Liz would gaze out the window at her boat launch—feet up, robe on, looking like a woman in a day-spa ad except for the occasional trickles of water meandering from various parts of her body. Over the first week, she spent much of our time together just marveling at Armelle’s betrayal. “I mean, I should have expected it,” said Liz. “I’ve been in this business long enough. But honestly, I thought it would be different with us. I thought that now that we were finally running things, we’d do it right. That’s what we always talked about, Armelle and I, in the early days. We’d banish the cynicism, the knives in the back. The bottom-line mentality. We’d support one another. We’d give each other the space to … self-express.” Liz flicked a hand at the phrase “self-express” and a couple of tiny droplets flew from her fingers and landed on my glasses. I realized that by “us” Liz wasn’t just talking about herself and Armelle. She meant us—our entire side of the human equation. It seemed naive but at the same time, didn’t we all nurture that hope back when it seemed so impossible? The impossibility of it made it safe for us to dream crazily like that—to be innocent in our imaginings, open-hearted, bursting with moronic faith in one another.
Liz had at some point forgotten to close that door in her heart, it struck me. She’d been closing it throughout her career, every time it blew open, like any smart, professional woman would. But then one day along came Marietta. And Marietta, for no reason in particular that I had been able to discern, was where Liz finally drew the line.
When I finally did ask about Marietta point blank, Liz’s response didn’t offer much illumination. “It just felt like time,” she shrugged, dabbing at her face with the sleeve of her robe. “After all the years I spent doing this job. It just felt like time for me to—” And here she interrupted herself with a sigh. “Stand firm.”
Eventually we abandoned the pretense of strategizing and just drank and lounged like ladies of leisure. For me, those were glorious, peaceful afternoons, not to mention a wonderful way to be unemployed—imbibing good wine in the splendidly appointed home of a wet, well-to-do woman. Liz would stroke Roger’s massive, snoring head, and we’d sip and gripe, gazing out over the lake. When the weather got warmer, Liz told me to bring a bathing suit and we could swim. We both knew there was nothing to be done, not really. The final episodes were in production, and who knew what they entailed, what kind of ignominious end had been devised for Marietta—certainly no one was telling Liz, or me. Ellen would sometimes text me minor updates with the eye-rolling emoji, but I never shared them with Liz. They mostly had to do with Riva and how much she sucked as a leader. Riva had been given the helm, something Ellen would not soon forget. It should have been Ellen, but Ellen’s slow way of talking had made everyone nervous, made her seem (as Mackie had explained apologetically) “too thinky”—eye-roll emoji—which was not “what is needed right now.”
Liz told me her final meeting with Armelle was not like any of their previous meetings. It did not take place at a restaurant, or at a catered soirée, but in Armelle’s actual office—for it turned out Armelle had an office. It was a beautiful office, of course, with an expansive sitting area, fresh flowers on every surface, practically. And there was coffee and dainty, expensive pastries served. But the point is, it was undeniably a meeting. In an office. An affront that Liz had trouble getting over to this day.
Liz had walked in wearing a billowing smock that concealed a thick towel she had tucked around her middle that morning. At a one point in the conversation, the point at which she’d decided she had had enough, Liz reached up under that smock, yanked out the towel like a magician revealing a bouquet, and slapped it, sopping, onto the coffee table, displacing the dainty arrangements of pastries Armelle’s assistant had laid out.
I made her describe that splattering moment to me over and over. I marveled and cackled every time. “Did you have a feeling,” I asked her, “like, this is the end? This is the end, so fuck it, I’m going out with a bang?”
She looked at me, surprised. “Not at all! I just thought: this is my moment! Finally, they’ll hear me! Finally I’ll make my feelings known! And once it’s out in the open—it’ll be great! We can all move forward together!”
This struck me as tragic. I stopped cackling and Liz looked up at me—saw it on my face.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t wrong.”
She leaned forward and held my gaze. Something big was coming now—a big reveal, we would’ve called it back in the writers’ room. Her face was like a gleeful child’s.
“Marietta is still dying,” she told me. “I haven’t stopped. I’ve been working on her this whole time.”
And then Liz laughed, as happy as I’d ever seen her. A large droplet that had formed on her chin shimmered from the laughter and plopped down onto Roger’s closed eyelid. The dog raised his head, snuffling but otherwise was too content in Liz’s lap to budge. After a moment, he noticed a rivulet streaming down his mistress’s forearm and lapped it up with total reverence.
Beneath the Ruins
Maxime Raymond Bock
Translated by Pablo Strauss
The heat wave was all over the news and the city smelled like a backed-up sewer. When the traffic ground to a halt, a wheezing from under the hood of Xavier’s old Civic made him worry it might be overheating, and he turned off the engine. It was so hot the figurine left on the dash by his niece had melted into a puddle of plastic from which only the tip of a witch’s broom poked out. With the windows rolled down and no air conditioning, Xavier too was roasting under the punishing rays of the midday sun. Not one micron of air moved. Fanning himself with the torn flap of a cardboard box salvaged from the junkyard on his car floor only made it worse, hitting his face with excruciating drafts of heat and pungent wafts of whatever lay rotting between the seats—the now flapless box held fried-chicken scraps, the dregs of a latte sprouted fungal growths that stretched fingers toward the light, and a plastic bag left by his niece last week oozed with the sludge of what had once been grapes. Moving his arm made Xavier sweat more, in drops that trickled from his armpits down along his ribs. He had unbuckled his seatbelt when the Turcot Interchange turned into a parking lot that morning, and could sense that this day would be an ordeal. A band of sweat ran diagonally along his chest. His T-shirt was soaked. He opened the door, less to get the air circulating, as he was well aware the air would do no such thing, than to foster the illusion that he was not trapped in this sauna. What a moron he’d been to paint this old beater black. He could have kept it powder blue. The rust had only returned to claim its due. And, anyway, who even cared about the colour of their car?
To his right, in an immaculate white 4x4 with its windows rolled up, a small family consisting of a husky guy with Oakleys on his forehead, a pony-tailed blonde, and two kids bent over their respective screens, was waiting to get back to the safety of their South Shore suburban home. From time to time Xavier stole a glance in the rear-view at the car behind him, and more specifically at its driver, whom he imagined was pretty, and his age, based on nothing more substantial than her sunglasses. They were similar to his own knockoff Ray Ban aviators. Hers might be real, he guessed, but she didn’t look like she could afford them, so he was betting fakes. Her car, like his, was a heap of scrap metal held together by a few coats of paint. The hood wasn’t the same colour as the body, and an accident had left her car with a broken left headlight and dented bumper. She gathered her hair up into a loose bun and blew away the strand that fell onto her nose. Behind her, Mount Royal shimmered in the heat. In front of Xavier’s Civic, four young people emerged from a red sedan whose back window was almost completely obstructed by luggage, smoking cigarettes to mask the smell of the joint they were sharing. All around, drivers and exhausted passengers were killing time, spilling out of their cars, chatting and cursing the orange cone mafia. The owners of an RV had taken out chairs and a folding table and sat playing cards in the shade of an unrolled awning. Traffic had been rerouted into the wrong lane. To the left lay the shoulder, the parapet and, beyond, the city skyscrapers. Every half hour a helicopter hovered over the gridlock a while, and then flew off in search of other stories. A convoy of three police motorcycles, sirens off but red and blue lights flashing, rolled slowly between Xavier’s car and the parapet, and then weaved its way through the cars, indifferent to the smell of weed.