Anyway, when Miriam met Ed he was a member of like a fraternity — you know what I mean, a group of students who were ashamed of their origins and put on high-class accents like they were part of the royal family. At first, she said, she thought it was kind of cute, that Ed was trying so hard to fit in. She told me she saw right through his act and decided she could help him “grow into himself.” I mean, bullshit, right — and she knew it was bullshit even at the time. But a woman like Miriam’s gotta have a project. Sometimes I think maybe I’m her newest project, but at the same time I think, What the fuck? I’ll tell you what: she’s my project. I love her.
Miriam and me come from two different worlds. Her mother was something high up at the university, and her father was a bigwig at Nestlé. When she was growing up, they moved to a new country every couple of years: Egypt, Canada, Nigeria, South Africa, Russia, Morocco. I mean, she’s a woman of the world. Sometimes she tells me, “Ed’s a real Tuindorper, totally white-bread. But you, you’ve got that Algerian blood.” She has this tone when she says it, like, This is heavy, man. And the look in her eye, yowza. I don’t know exactly what it all means, but so what? The bottom line is, it’s pretty great with us between the sheets, if you follow me.
But I digress.
I love Miriam, you with me? And I know she’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. Hey, put yourself in her position: your hubby’s cheating on you with some pretty young intern while you sit home and look after a couple of kids. That’d make you nuts, am I right?
So, okay, this is where the story really begins.
From the first time we ever did it — Ed works irregular shifts and I’m pretty flexible, so she texts me when it’s okay to come over — she’s spilled her guts to me. I’m not so dumb I believe in love at first sight, but something just clicked between Miriam and me. “Soul mates,” she calls us. That’s such a Miriam thing to say. “We’re both outsiders,” she tells me. “We understand each other.” It don’t bother me she’s fifteen years older. Just the opposite: I think older women are sexy, they know exactly what they want in bed.
Shit, I’m getting off track again. Focus, Armin!
So Ed’s fucking this intern, right, and Miriam finds out about it. She confronts him. He goes all guilty, all pitiful, all I’m sorry, you’re the one I love, it don’t mean nothing, and he begs her to forgive him. And she does, the dope.
Okay, fine, I know what you’re thinking: she’s cheating on him too. To which I say, Well, who started it? Miriam was lonely. Can you blame her for taking comfort from a guy like me? A guy who at least listens to her?
As my mom’s only son, trust me, I have learned how to listen.
So Miriam forgives Ed. But meanwhile, Ed goes right on nailing this intern every chance he gets. They’re snorting coke — possibly coke they get from the Chink, what do I know? — and Ed don’t realize right away the woman he’s boinking is the devil in disguise. But then, see, the bitch commences to blackmail him. If you don’t leave your wife and kids, I’ll tell the hospital administrator what you’ve been up to. I’ll say you forced me into it. Abuse of power. Shit like that. So you’ve got a doctor riding the coke train and banging an intern: Ed would definitely lose his job and probably his medical license or whatever you call it. I got all this from Miriam.
So once again, Ed fesses up, only this time Miriam plays it smart. She “forgives” him, she says, but now she has a plan.
“You’re my sweet revenge,” she tells me, this one time after we do it. We’re smoking cigarettes in bed. Ed’s working a double shift, and the girls are at his parents’. “You’re my secret weapon.”
Tell you the truth, that comment shook me up a little. It wasn’t so much what she said but the way she said it, the bitterness in her voice, and the way she looked... like I wasn’t even there, like I wasn’t lying right beside her in the bed.
Anyway, Miriam doesn’t trust Ed no more, but she doesn’t want to leave him because of the kids. So she goes all detective on his ass: when he’s in the shower, she checks his e-mail and his texts. And that’s when the shit really hits the fan.
I’ll kill Miriam if you don’t divorce her.
You’d better get rid of your daughters. My patience is running out.
You’re mine!!!
I hate Miriam.
Miriam’s a cunt and has to die.
And then there are Ed’s wimpy responses:
Calm down, sweetheart.
I need more time.
I love you.
This is all pretty recent, by the way. I was with Miriam just last night, and she brought me up to speed.
So now I gotta be careful what I write. I don’t want to screw anybody over until I’m 100 percent sure. I know what it’s like to be blamed for shit I didn’t do. I mean, how many times have we had the cops at the door because so-and-so made a crack and everybody’s all, It must’ve been Armin who done it?
How am I supposed to prove I didn’t, right?
I mean, come on!
Look, I figure you’d probably freak if you found out your husband’s lover wanted you dead, right? So I told Miriam maybe she ought to report it. Which, by the way, sounded really weird coming out of my mouth. Report it? Like the cop on the corner is your friend, right? But I just didn’t trust the situation. I was worried about Miriam.
“This is private,” she said. “I don’t want the girls to hear anything about it. I’ll deal with it.” And then she climbed on top of me and drove me out of my gourd with her tongue. We fucked like we never fucked before, like... well, like wild animals. It was like Miriam squeezed herself inside of me. She bit me, licked me, raked my back with her long sharp nails, sucked my balls — Jesus, I thought I was about to black out — and meanwhile she whispered all this shit I figured was meant to stir me up and make our coming even more explosive, words and sentences I didn’t really absorb — you know what I mean, we all say weird stuff when we’re excited. I mean, I get it that Miriam wished the bitch was dead and I’m not a baby, I’ve got a pretty rich imagination myself, if you get my drift, I’ve downloaded some illegal videos — you know, where Somebody A really hurts Somebody B, hits her, beats her with whips, cuts her with razors, tortures her — snuff films, I mean, that shit’s fucked up.
Anyway, I didn’t think much about the fairy tale she told me last night until those cops showed up this morning, but since then I can’t get it out of my mind.
And I can totally see it happening.
Miriam waiting outside the hospital for her husband’s chippie. Inviting her for a cup of coffee so they can “talk things out.” Driving in Miriam’s mint-green MINI Cooper convertible from North Holland down to Tuindorp Oostzaan, the wind in their hair, it’s actually much too cold to be driving with the top down but Miriam wants to teach the bitch a lesson, she’s wearing a leather jacket and a cap, she’s prepared, she snuck the Mercury Snackbar’s keys out of my pants pocket the day before, when I slipped out of bed to take a dump. Miriam parking the car somewhere on the Meteorenweg, and the two of them strolling to the snack bar, Ed’s cunt grossed out when she sees the Mercury’s grimy windows, This is where you want to go for coffee? The Chink’s already long gone, Miriam knows that because I told her. Fine, so she holds the door open for the bitch, gives her a little wink, they’re in this together, they understand each other, they both know Ed’s a piece of shit and they’ll figure a way to get through this, but the second Miriam locks the door behind them the nightmare begins. Miriam’s thought of everything: the ropes, the bread knife, the chain saw, she switched on the fryer before she headed north so it would be nice and hot by the time they got back, she don’t leave nothing to chance, and meanwhile the cunt’s all shitting bricks and begging Miriam to let her go, but Miriam’s got her chained to the meat hook that’s attached to the kitchen ceiling by then, like a dead pig, like a dog — the Chinks eat dog, don’t they? — her mouth duct-taped, and while the bitch shivers from the cold and the terror, Miriam goes to town, one finger at a time, one toe at a time, the blood dripping into an old-fashioned iron bucket, the cunt turning yellow then gray then finally white and blue and she’s not dead yet, her left shoulder jerks when Miriam slices a chunk of meat from her leg and tosses it into the boiling oil in the fryer — can you imagine watching this happen to you, you know you’re gonna die and there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it, just hope you’ll pass out soon — but Miriam goes at it for hours, big pieces, torso, thighs, arms, she trims them to size with the chain saw and one by one the hunks of meat and bone and hair and guts and everything all disappear in the boiling oil.