The Power Couple

A mirror hung behind the bar, mostly reflecting the half-empty liquor bottles lined up in front of it, but it gave me a view of everything behind me. That’s how I saw them walk in. Declan had lost weight, and the chinchilla coat Mafalda wore nearly swallowed up her face. I pretended not to see them and tried to pay attention to the story my date was telling. Something about a baseball game....he must have been talking about the World Series because all I heard was “Game Seven.”

Through the mirror, I saw them sit at a table that was directly in my sightline. Declan’s face was all angles and shadows. He hadn’t looked like that the last time I saw him when he abandoned our plans to buy a house and went back to her. Back then, he looked bright and healthy. Now, it looked like he was into drugs again. Mafalda didn’t care if he did drugs, not as long as he did whatever she wanted. 

I turned to my date. His mouth was moving, but the sound seemed to die in his throat. A few feet away from the bar, there was a Steinway, and the pianist was playing bouncy jazz riffs and banging so hard on the keys I wondered what the piano had done to deserve such punishment. 

Declan hated that kind of music. I’d had a little transistor radio in our kitchen so I could listen to music while I washed dishes. Whenever any jazz tunes came on it, he’d march into the kitchen and demand I change the station. After he went back to her, I found myself buying jazz records: Errol Garner. Oscar Peterson. Fats Waller. I began to put them on whenever I washed dishes, letting the sounds of jangling chords fill the apartment as I stood over the sink, watching soap bubbles expand.

I tried to focus on my date. Even though his words rushed past me like cars on a freeway, I could still take note of his green eyes, his soft blond hair. He wore a green sweater, and his broad shoulders and curving muscles filled it out well. My mother had set us up. Up until that point, I had resisted her attempts to find someone for me, but after Declan and Mafalda went on the talk show circuit telling the world they were back together, I decided my mother was right that I needed to get on with my life. 

My mother had never approved of me getting mixed up with those people. I didn’t listen to her at first. He was the Declan Garrison from Falcon Flight, one of the biggest bands in the world. He and Mafalda needed an assistant; I would’ve been crazy not to take the job. When they split up, he asked me to go to California with him, and I went. 

We spent two years there, partying at L.A. clubs until three in the morning and then watching the dawn break on the beach while hummingbirds darted in and out of the bougainvillea vines that spilled over the walls of our rented house. When he decided to record a solo album, I was the one who called all the session men Declan wanted. Two of his former bandmates hung up the phone, but one of them -- drummer Andy Black -- came down to the studio. The way the two of them locked eyes while Declan pushed his voice to its highest note and Andy bashed his cymbals made me shiver like someone had dropped an ice cube down my back. Fuck me, I thought. If this is what it’s like with just two of them, imagine what it was like when all four of them were together.

I was with him when journalists came around to ask about the new album. I bought them pitchers of iced tea that they didn’t drink and tiny egg salad sandwiches that they devoured while a roach clip smoldered and singed the surface of the patio table. 

I was the one who convinced him to take a call from his twenty-year-old daughter (whom he hadn’t seen in six years -- since before his marriage to Mafalda), and I was the one who talked him into ending the Mexican standoff he’d been having with his brother. When his bandmate and songwriting partner ended a three-year freeze-out, I was the one who stopped Declan from slamming down the phone. 

When Declan wanted to go back to New York, I called our Los Angeles landlord about the lease (he was happy to see us go, even if he didn’t say it outright), I booked the flights on TWA, and I called realtors from our Hell’s Kitchen hotel room about beach houses in the Hamptons. (If he was so keen to stay on the beach, why couldn’t we just stay in L.A.?)

Then, one morning, Declan turned to me and said, “Mafalda and I are getting back together. We are going to announce it to the press next week.”

I felt as if the ground had dropped away and I was hanging in mid-air. My heart beat so heavily that the sound in my ears resembled a pounding surf. Declan had an appointment that day to look at a 17th-century seaside mansion, which we were going to live in together, and now he was going back to her? Just like that?

Within days, I was back in my mother’s house, and Declan and Mafalda were on TV holding hands. She wore a semi-sheer blouse with no bra, her pancake tits hanging out like a truckstop whore’s. Why wasn’t she under an overpass giving sloppy blowjobs to Teamsters in exchange for cheap blow? 

But what about Anna? The interviewer asked. 

Anna and I didn’t mean anything. I was partying and she kept me company, that’s all. She’s nobody. Declan looked right at the camera when he said that. Nobody. 

I would rather have been called a floozy, a slut, a trollop, a homewrecker -- anything was better than nobody. If the television hadn’t weighed fifty pounds, I would’ve shoved it out of my mother’s third-floor window. 

“That’s funny,” I heard myself say to my date as he finished his story. He was smiling, so I must have understood some of it. I fished the cherry out of my drink. It was missing the stem and was half-crushed. It felt cold against my teeth. The bartender asked if I wanted another. 

As the bartender set a fresh drink in front of me, a denim shirt suddenly filled the space behind me in the mirror. Declan. I sucked the rum from my drink and turned to face him. He wore sunglasses. It was a bright winter day, the kind where the sun and the snow have a standoff, resulting in a searing light that hurts your eyes. But inside the bar, the light was low, except for the flickering candles on every table. 

He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned close. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “All the things I’ve been telling the press about you -- they’re not true. You know that, right?”

I looked up at him. His eyes were sunken in behind his dark glasses, and the way his thin, graying skin draped over his skull reminded me of a dirty sheet flung over a sawhorse. His arms were reedy, with sharp angles where his elbows bent. 

“Of course,” I said, “I know.”

Declan leaned in close enough for his stubble to brush my cheek. When I pulled back, I glanced at the mirror. Mafalda was staring right at me. I felt a shiver and wrapped my arms across my chest. 

The pianist played the same chord over and over, hitting the keys hard as if some living thing was inside the piano, and he wanted it dead.

“It’s not true that I never cared about you. I loved being with you. But I can’t tell them that,” Declan said. 

Tell who? I thought. No one will put you in jail for saying how you really feel. 

I looked in the mirror. Her eyes were still fixed on me. There was no expression on her face. I almost wished she would frown, glare, or cry even. But instead, every time I looked in the mirror, I saw her staring back at me. I just wanted to grab my date and get out of there. 

As Declan bent over to kiss my cheek, I noticed the strange, reddish-brown patches on his skin. I didn’t mean to recoil. 

His wife was still staring at me in the mirror. 

Finally, Declan went back to his table. I turned to my date and asked if we could go someplace else. 

Outside, the sun-on-snow light was blazing. Gray slush piled up along the curb. My date tentatively put his arm around my shoulder.

“I didn’t realize you were that Anna,” he said. 

I winced. “I just want to put it behind me now,” I said. I hoped that he wouldn’t ask me a bunch of questions or, worse, beg me to go back and get him an autograph. 

“You did look pretty uncomfortable when he came over,” he said. A taxi roared by, splashing my legs with grimy slush. 

“It’s not him,” I said. “It’s her. It was her idea for them to get back together. If she had told him to tie me in a sack and dump me in the river, I think he would have. I sometimes wish I had never gone to work for them.”

I glanced up at my date and added, “Sorry to unload on you like that.”

He squeezed my shoulder. “It’s ok,” he said. “Honestly, I thought they were nuts ever since they did that naked protest in Norway. I once read that Declan planned to visit his estranged mother but Mafalda threatened to kill herself if he went, so he didn’t.”

I remembered the nightly calls Declan took from Mafalda when he’d lock himself in the bedroom for an hour or more and the uneasy feeling I’d have when I heard the metallic scrape of the latch opening once his conversation was over. I always tensed just before the door opened. Would he go back to her? Would I have to leave?

Or worse? 

“To tell you the truth, when it was over, I was relieved.”

I wound my arm around my date’s waist. He smelled like Irish Spring. Declan always smelled like stale cigarettes and sometimes whiskey. I looked up at my date, at how the sun caught the highlights in his blonde hair, how his cheeks pinked up from the cold. 

My mother had been right -- I should meet someone closer to my own age.

My mind flashed back eight months to a sailboat rocking on a blue surf, where the sun glittered hard on the cresting waves. Declan leaned back on his elbow and looked up at me through his sunglasses. I could see myself reflected there. The way the lenses curved made my eyes look huge, like a baby’s. 

“Anna,” he said to me, “I’ve written so many songs about love. But I don’t know if I ever really understood what love is.” 

He pushed up his sunglasses, and I noticed the creases near his eyes. He wore a sleeveless shirt, which showed his wiry arms. His teeth were tan from tobacco stains. He pulled me into his lap.

The wind picked up, and the boat listed sideways before settling back on its keel. 

“Do you love me, Anna?” he asked. I said yes because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. 

“Hey, look,” my date said, pointing to the movie theater marquee that was across the street from where we stood. “The new James Bond is playing. Should we go see it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do that.” 

Inside the theater, with a bucket of salty popcorn between us, my date stroked my hair as we watched airborne sports cars come crashing to the pavement without shattering. 

I thought of Mafalda’s eyes staring at me through the mirror at the bar and realized I never had to see her or Declan ever again. 

I nuzzled my date’s neck and once again breathed in his Irish Spring. I smiled and thought: so fresh and clean.