Amy Savage: HAUNTING VIVIAN • Cleaver Magazine

Amy Savage
HAUNTING VIVIAN

The first ex to haunt Vivian waits until she’s left her bar stool to use the restroom. On return, she finds his embossed business card cowering next to her martini, the bumpy letters of his name like chocolate-covered ants, striving to entice but making her skin crawl. She quickly scans the crowd, but his bald arrogant head is nowhere to be seen. That white shiny orb of a skull that had drawn her like a moth to a flame. Vivian texts her friend Kelly, who’d nursed her back to life when he’d cheated, who’d urged Vivian to change her social media status to widowed and, whenever she thought of him, to chant, “He’s deceased, I’m released!” For closure, Vivian had even written up a sample obituary for him. Cause of death: cerebral hematoma resulting from fall from dude ranch fence. It wasn’t so far-fetched—he had nearly tumbled on that trip to Utah.

“EERIE,” Kelly now responds. “Coincidence?” The next day, Vivian receives a LinkedIn request from him. A week later she receives a second LinkedIn email which leaves her spooked. The subject beckons: Someone is noticing you. They still want to connect.

The second ex to haunt Vivian appears ten months after the first. Vivian is clerking at the local library when she catches a whiff of his caustic cologne and flees circulation. While she peers at him from the children’s section, he paces a dozen times through the DVDs, stopping to finger the rom-coms, tilting cases outward, then popping them back in, disgusted. He looks thinner but with the same callously contemptuous lips, the lips that would kiss Vivian’s tenderly and then tell her she was too disorganized to make it through law school. “Has to be a doppelgänger,” Kelly says. “Public libraries are beneath him.” But Vivian isn’t so sure. She knows how queasy she felt when she saw him. For that obit, she makes him a father: survived by five devastated and resentful spawn. In lieu of flowers, send donations to the Baldwinsville Public Library.

The third? Well. Elliot isn’t exactly an ex. And, to make it more complicated, he’s nowhere near dead to her.

◊

It’s a Sunday afternoon in late October, a day so uncannily sweltering as to cause wobbly mirages on the streets and prickly chafing between Vivian’s thighs, when Elliot calls. Her first serious crush in high school. She’d even go so far as to say first love, the boy who eclipsed all the others. Vivian had collected bits of him: a scrap of red satin from his cape in their school’s production of Much Ado, a stiff tube sock that had fallen from his gym bag. She had, at the end of lunch one day, slipped one of his chewed-up Capri Sun straws into her pocket and that night, after finishing her AP American History response paper, sucked on it in the dark, ran it across her lips, inhaled the last trapped droplet of 16% juice, still waiting for his mouth.

Vivian and Elliot haven’t talked for five years—since she was a freshman in college. She sees his name on her phone and is surprised to feel her palms turn clammy and a sudden urge to tidy. She’d noted everything about him, studied him. Tall and sturdy with thick, messy brown hair, fluoride-stained teeth, and long jazzy fingers, adorable love handles with shimmery stretch marks. She would ask him to reach for the highest beakers in Chemistry just to see those rippled silver lines, manifestations of his ravenous appetite, his body’s bursting from within. She’d stared at his yearbook picture for hours, blushing when she read and re-read his scrawled salutation in the back cover (“Hey lady—” He deemed her a lady!), envisioning the halter-topped, lightning-bugged, and Elliot’s-lap-riding possibilities of “We should hang out this summer.” All while longingly sucking his straw. She could practically conjure him.

“VR!” Elliot says now on the phone. Her old nickname. Virtual Reality. She’d always beat him at GoldenEye 007 at their friend Jenna’s house. He had relished defeat, playfully punching her arm, grabbing the console from her, any excuse to touch her. And she had happily succumbed to the most rudimentary form of flirtation: teasing.

“Just drifting through,” Elliot says now. He doesn’t mention where he’s headed. “Went to see my parents.” As far as Vivian knows, they still live in their hometown. “Can I stop by?”

He said “I”. He’s traveling alone. No mention of the girl he’s been dating all through college. The girl who Vivian was sure had initiated him into manhood. “Yes,” Vivian says, too quickly, grabbing a sponge and swiftly wiping crumbs from the counter into the sink. “Of course.”

“Perfect. I’ll be there around nine.”

Nine. Either he plans to stop just long enough to pee—she squeezes a ring of blue chemicals around the inner rim of her toilet—and will drive through the night, or he plans to stay over. In her studio apartment, she has a non-reclining armchair. And a full bed. He’s six-two. Well then. She makes the bed, plumps her deflated pillows. He’ll be hungry after a long drive. He’ll need to put his feet up. She shreds cheese and cracks eggs for a quiche. She whisks her broom around to catch cobwebs.

The cloying heat makes her drowsy. She wheedles her splintered windowpane open a few more inches but, with only two windows on the same wall, there’s no cross-breeze. The garlands of paper bats she’s strung up for Halloween hang static on their strings. Sweat runs down her neck. She turns on her window fan and flaps her arms around to stir the air, pleading with the puny machine. Her armpits smell impudently of the onion’s she’s diced. Why did she decide to bake? It’s 8:30. She needs a shower. As she lathers her hair, she hears the buzzer. Crap. He’s never early. Enshrouded in steam, Vivian is visited by an uninvited memory.

She’s seventeen again, walking to school. Sometimes she would come upon Elliot at the corner of Dove and Eagle and they’d walk together. One afternoon in study hall, he asked if he could pick her up the next morning at 7:30. Because he didn’t have a car, “pick you up” meant on foot—it implied he would do this with his body, their bodies. They’d walk the whole way together. Was this her first date? Would he ask her out? But at 7:40 he still wasn’t there. She knew she’d be late for the eight o’clock bell if she didn’t leave soon. She was so nervous, she had to shit. She felt a few bubbly pains in her stomach and then it deepened, a bowel churning gurgle that, deepening further, threatened to blast. Vivian ran to the bathroom, exhaled as her body sputtered, emptied. She strained to clear herself but nothing more released. A few seconds later, another gnawing and stabbing pain gripped her from within before splattering into the bowl. After she washed her hands, Vivian ran to the window to look for Elliot. 7:45. A barren tract of asphalt. Vivian left, walking faster than was comfortable to make up time. Her calves burned and she would have jogged but her backpack was so heavy it would smash around and probably cause a bruise. She was such a loser. But about halfway to school, she heard her name. She recognized his voice, but it was rough, agitated.

“You didn’t wait,” Elliot said.

She expected jolliness, an apology. “You were late.”

“Why didn’t you wait. I caught up to you,” he said, his arms gripping his backpack straps, his normally expressive, lively fingers clenching the padded nylon. In her fantasies the night before, those fingers had reached for hers, woven together, held in tender pressure. “We would have been on time.”

“I’m sorry,” Vivian said.

“See you at school,” he said and strode off. She felt like a bitch. How different it could have been had he said, “Me too,” and reached for her hand. But those long, sturdy legs launched him forward and away. That day, he was a little early to school. Vivian, with her much shorter legs, though walking briskly, barely made the first bell.

Now, in her studio apartment, she hastily rinses the foamy lather from her hair, towels off, and throws on a thin scoop neck tee and her best jeans. A quick flick of liquid eyeliner. She’s a woman now. She can’t believe he’s early. And she hopes he hasn’t taken off. Mercifully, she hears the buzzer again. He’s grown up, too.

“It’s me,” he says, invoked by the intercom.

Vivian’s finger slips, sweaty on the little white button. Her lips graze the plastic grille covering the microphone. “Come up.”

When she opens the door, he’s more beautiful than before. His jaw is sharper, his brow settled. A man now. She wants to kiss his eyelids, pluck the stray hairs between his eyebrows. But he’s still wearing graphic tees and cargo pants. At their high school’s awards night, Elliot won the Ray Holmes award—he played a mean jazz piano—and had worn to the ceremony a blue plaid button-down with an irresistible yellow and red polka-dotted bow tie. His gray slacks were held up by suspenders, his pants were a little tight, the pockets jammed to bursting and jingling with all the gear he’d kept stowed in those signature cargo pants. He was guileless, with the fashion sense of a storybook toad.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says now, grinning. Is this a slippery apology for all those years ago? He hugs Vivian, her face going straight to his ripe armpit, musky as a coy dog. Her head floats with lust. She resists the urge to go back in for another whiff, to twiddle his hairy nipples through the thin screen-printed cotton.

“Hungry?” she asks, trying to ground herself.

He makes direct eye contact, irises the color of bourbon. His voice is softly intimate. He sounds full of regret when he says, “Always.” He grazes her back with his musical hands and she feels a tingle that spreads to the nape of her neck. She feels like she’s never been touched before, the ghosts of her exes dissipating into the ether, Vivian is a pure well, primed to be pumped and slurped and drained dry by her first love. But what can she offer to drink?

“I have milk and seltzer,” she says, abashed.

“Aha,” Elliot says, and reaches into both his cargo pockets and pulls out two airline-sized bottles of twist-top cabernet.

They clink glasses and joke about their friends and teachers from high school, picking up where they left off. Vivian slices the quiche and serves them each a generous piece. For a while Elliot talks and talks but doesn’t eat, the fork floating in his hand. But after he finishes his wine, he gives Vivian a pink-toothed grin and digs in. She serves him a second slice. Then he starts serving himself. Little flecks of pastry cling to his plump wine-stained lips. He eats and eats and eats until he eats the last piece. Then he tilts and taps the empty tin to collect the crumbs, dumping them onto his palm and slapping them to his mouth.

Vivian could purr with satisfaction, jump into his burly lap on her rickety kitchen chair. But she holds back—this is the guy who learned to knit to make his college girlfriend a scarf. Vivian hadn’t planned to be petty, but where is this worthy-of-knitting girlfriend, anyway? “Does Monica cook?” Vivian asks, hating herself.

A storm brews on Elliot’s brow. He reaches for the black plastic cauldron of multicolored hard candies Vivian set out for Halloween.

“Monica’s in Patagonia studying penguins.” Elliot unwraps two green candies and crunches them simultaneously. “She called me last week to tell me her translator Raúl,” he rolls his eyes, swallowing the shards, “not only looks like Gael García, but can coax flames from ice,” he says, his voice chopped.

“Sorry.” Vivian’s not sorry. Again. “Hey, let’s listen to our old faves.” She digs in her dresser and finds a mix tape Jenna had made her. The opening drums of “Naked Eye” take her back to the summer before Junior year, before the fall, before Elliot cooled from their near-miss. She rises to wash the dishes.

“Let me help,” he says, at her back, his arms reaching over hers, his hands over her hands. They are dancing and scrubbing the buttery crumbs from the cutlery. His closeness, his forwardness, is what she has always wanted. His chin rests gently on her hair and he hums along to the song. She slides the plates under the gushing faucet, slipping them into their places to drip. She hums along, hypnotized by his crooning vibrating in her back, merging with her own voice, blending like honey. Her hands continue to wash, dishes turning smooth as a trance.

“Let’s watch a movie,” he says when she’s placed the last fork in the drainer. So, he’s not leaving or interested in talking.

Vivian puts on Hocus Pocus. It has finally cooled off. They share a blanket on her bed, close, but not quite touching.

She loves this movie. She loves it more with Elliot there. She loves him. Again. As if there’d been a doubt. They’re going to make out any minute now. Her jack o’ lantern string lights cast a cozy flickering glow over her bed. She hears his breathing change. But it’s not heavy-sexy, only the perfectly regular and relaxing rhythm of someone who’s fallen asleep. She admires him, takes him in. He’s here. He’s asleep in her bed. On the senior trip to Six Flags, when they had become “just friends,” they’d shared a seat on the bus, and he’d fallen asleep and drooled on her shoulder, his body as tantalizing as fresh lemonade to a parched tongue.

She leans toward him now and touches the tip of her tongue to his salty temple.

◊

Vivian wakes to the sound of galloping horses and hissing kettles. The super must have fired up the steam radiators for the first time this fall. It is still dark. From the window, the crisp air pools over the warmth of her bed. Vivian is as comfortable as she has ever felt. Wait—Elliot is curled against her, his arm draped over her, tucked under her breasts. His breathing is regular and deep. Hypnotic. He sleeps like the dead.

He is where he belongs. Where he belonged all along.

Vivian’s nipples perk up, alert. She shifts her hips, arching her lower back slightly to press against him. She’s already wet. She hopes and hopes he will get hard, sink himself into her. He doesn’t. She is aching to turn and nibble his ravenous mouth, to nip his dainty earlobes right off, suck his Coltrane-plunking fingertips until they shriveled, get a taste of those silvery noodle stretch marks. But she’s reluctant. Snug in his arms. She mustn’t break the spell. Outside her window, the first bird chirps. She’s waited eight years. What’s another hour?

Shadows shift on the ceiling. Vivian inhales the pleasant sharpness of woodsmoke and sweet mulled decay of fallen leaves. The birds grow louder. The room swings from twilight black to crepuscular blue. Elliot stirs. Now, she thinks. Kiss me. She wishes she were a little more impulsive. And she worries about whether he’ll want to shower in the morning. She only scrubbed the toilet, not the tub with its grimy rim of all the skin she’s shed. Worse, she only has the one towel, the one she used last night, the one that passed over her nether parts, catching her smell and probably snagging a few hairs.

Elliot pulls her a little closer, nuzzles her neck. A pleasurable chill nets her scalp. He breathes deeply, smelling her hair. Kisses the crown of her head. Wait, Vivian thinks. Who does he think he’s kissing? She could be any warm body. A moment passes and she feels his arms and shoulders flex slightly. He’s waking up. Does he even know where he is?

“Huh,” he says, groggily. “Jenna uses the same shampoo.”

Vivian bristles. She always suspected he’d had a crush on Jenna after her. Her successor. He’d never dated Jenna, as far as Vivian knew. But now she wasn’t so sure. No—she was sure.

“Jenna?”

“Yeah,” Elliot whispers, his arms still wrapped around her. His voice rises to a conversational volume. He’s awake. “I saw her this week when I was home.”

“Well,” Vivian says. Her eyes sting as if shampoo has dribbled where it shouldn’t. He’s been on tour. The Penguin Revenge Tour, Cold Case Crush Tour, Near-Miss Tour. Nearly-Mrs. Tour. His presence in her bed is curdling.

“I guess Jenna and I have the same taste,” she says.

Elliot laughs at the coincidence but doesn’t catch her meaning. He looks at his watch. “Seven?! My alarm didn’t go off!” He yanks his arm out from under her neck, throws the blanket off them both. She feels robbed of the warmth and grabs the blanket back for herself. “I’d better go,” he says, picking crusted drool from his cheek.

“I can see,” Vivian says.

“You got a washcloth?” Vivian has a clean washcloth but points to the dishcloth she’d used to handle the hot pie tin. He yanks it from the oven handle and scrubs his lips, pastry crumbs and dried spittle flaking off onto Vivian’s floor.

Vivian notes his stubble is only coming in over his lip and in a weak patch on his neck. Elliot shoves his feet into his sneakers. “Monica’s flight arrives at nine,” he says as he turns the knob and disappears.

“Right through you,” Vivian whispers.

Vivian hears the ding of the elevator. She flings her blanket aside and grabs her robe. The elevator doors close slowly, but she can’t catch a glimpse of Elliot. The orange-lit numbers drop until they reach L. She stands looking down the empty hallway for a long minute. She realizes he hadn’t even bothered to shut the door behind him. She’s in the frame the way he left it. She steps back into her apartment and feels a tiny sliver of pleasure to shut the door herself. Vivian is suddenly very hungry; she feels dizzy, a sugar crash that could make her faint. In her kitchen, there’s no sign of Elliot’s visit but for his dinky wine bottles and her empty pie tin. She’d been a fool to expect leftovers.

Vivian’s hand trembles as she selects one of the candies from her cauldron.

She texts Kelly, who, thank goodness, wakes up early for spin class. She needs to contact someone. Her fingers shakily tap out:

So, Elliot stopped by last night.

THE Elliot???

No, an apparition. Yes, THE. Woke up spooning but he took off already

Vivian untwists the candy wrapper and parts her lips for the red tablet.

Viv, you’ve been looking at this all wrong

Vivian rolls her meager consolation into her cheek. She didn’t reach out to be reprimanded. Can’t Kelly see the pattern? She’s about to silence her notifications when Kelly’s text comes in.

You’ve been haunting them, too

The stale sugary lozenge dissolves, vanishing into her.

Amy Savage’s fiction appears in Bellevue Literary Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Cleaver Magazine, Oyster River Pages, and elsewhere. Honors include selection for One Story’s Summer Writers’ Conference ’22, AWP’s Writer to Writer, and Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop’s year-long manuscript program. Based in Rhode Island, she teaches medical Spanish, translates, and performs in medical simulations. She recently finished writing a collection of stories in which this story appears (or disappears?). @asavagewriter