The Weather of Menopause by Louise Marburg

It was late, eleven o’clock, the end of a day in which Katrina had gotten nothing done, avoiding her studio in favor of the trifecta of time wasters, Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Her husband, Gabriel, stood in front of the open closet in his boxers, hanging up the suit he had worn to his job as an entertainment attorney. Though men were said to age more gracefully than women, in Katrina’s opinion that wasn’t necessarily true. Most of the men she’d known since they were young were overweight or balding, often both, or unattractive in the first place and made more so by time. Gabe, however, had aged as beautifully as a piece of driftwood.

“I would be miserable if you had an affair,” she said. She lay on their bed watching a rerun of Downton Abbey, wrapped in a fluffy white bathrobe. “But I want you to know that I would understand.”

“I’m not going to have an affair,” he said. He flicked a piece of lint off a pant leg. He had been out at a business dinner with a celebrity whose name Katrina had forgotten almost as soon as she’d heard it. After nearly twenty-five years, she was immune to Gabe’s clients.

“But you could,” I said. “I’m giving you permission.”

“Stop it, would you? I don’t want your permission.”

“Because I know I’ve lost my looks.”

“You make it sound as if you’ve misplaced them. Have you checked between the sofa cushions?”

“Don’t tease.” She slid down into the pillows. “It isn’t fun being me. I had about twelve hot flashes today.” There probably hadn’t been twelve, or maybe there had; she lived in the weather of menopause these days, tropical 24/7. She adjusted her bathrobe to contain her lolling boobs. She wished she had a chest as flat as Lady Mary Crawley’s, so she could wear a long strand of pearls without it sliding into her cleavage. She used to be so lovely that people stared at her, but middle age had sucked the female from her face and fattened her hips and breasts, so she resembled an effeminate man with a Mae West body, her uncle and mother combined. Gabe did legal work for a well-known actress the same age as Katrina who had managed to stay thin and youthful. It was with this actress that Katrina imagined Gabe having an affair. They were close friends, Katrina and the actress, whose name was Calliope Lasko. Several years ago, Calliope bought one of Katrina’s paintings, which was subsequently admired by a movie director she was dating. The painting the director bought caught the eye of one of his friends, then a friend of that friend bought a painting too, until eventually Katrina was selling paintings at a consistent clip and becoming rather well known herself. Now all manner of people bought her paintings—she was represented by galleries in New York and Los Angeles—but that it was Calliope to whom she owed her success was an itchy, irrefutable fact. Maybe she’d been destined to be successful anyway, but she would never know.

Gabe got into bed and opened his latest novel. Katrina turned off the television. Too lazy to get up and put on a nightgown, she decided to sleep in her bathrobe. She didn’t want to have sex with Gabe. Sex was a country from which she’d recently emigrated with no foreseeable plan to return.

“What do you think of Calliope?” she said.

“She’s nice,” Gabe said.

“No, I mean do you think she’s still pretty?”

“People do,” he said.

“I’m not talking about people,” Katrina said. “I’m asking if you think so.”

“Not anymore,” he said. “She’s far too thin, and I don’t think that plastic surgeon did her any favors, he took all the character out of her face.”

“You think so?” Katrina said happily. She reached for her own book on the nightstand, a biography of Lucian Freud, and perused the color plates of Freud’s scabrous paintings of hideous naked people. A feather of doubt tickled her mind. Calliope was beautiful by anyone’s standards. “I used to be as thin as Calliope.”

“When you were young,” Gabe said. “A fifty-something woman shouldn’t look like she was just released from a camp.”

“That’s a horrible way to put that.” She was always shocked when he was crass. Most of the time he was a gentleman. She had often been told how lucky she was to be married to him, though as far as she knew, no one had ever told him he was lucky to be married to her. “Do you love me?” she said.

“Of course I love you.”

Hearing him say he loved her was like having her back scratched: it felt so good she had to ask again. “Really and truly?”

He didn’t look up from his book. “Really and truly.”

She opened the drawer of the nightstand and shook from an amber vial two pale blue tablets that would ensure a dreamless sleep. Do you still think I’m pretty?” she wanted to ask, knowing he would say yes, but decided a lie would be more dispiriting than the truth. She wished it was really as simple as running her hand between the cushions, as if her youth were a dime and penny and a piece of lint.

§

Next to cocktail hour, which she religiously observed, morning was Katrina’s favorite time of day. Nursing a skim cappuccino, she would sit by the studio window and watch the sunlight warming the neighborhood’s rooftop water towers, peacefully scrolling through her favorite shopping sites on her iPad before her assistant, Jeremy, arrived later on. She was painting a series of abstract canvases in shades of gray that were so gigantic that she had to use a rolling ladder; Jeremy was in charge of pushing her around. He was also responsible for stretching and gessoing the canvases, cleaning Katrina’s pallets and brushes, and laying out the tubes of paint. A fledgling painter himself, he was supposed to be learning from her for school credit. Learning what, Katrina couldn’t imagine: though she had been painting and drawing all her life, she could not have articulated what any of it meant. But Jeremy was able to. When he talked about her influences and imagery and compositions, she tuned him out. She didn’t want to know what she was doing. Knowing would kill it, she thought.

Jeremy shuffled in around eleven, his thick, shoulder-length hair falling into his eyes, his shoulders hunched. He wore the same thing he’d worn the last time she’d seen him, a ripped flannel shirt over a stretched-out white t-shirt, camouflage cargo pants that were splattered with paint. He was a stunningly unattractive boy, with a horsey, pock-marked face and snaggled gray teeth he kept hidden by never smiling. He worked for Katrina three days a week.

Her phone rang as Jeremy took off his formless dark coat. He picked it up before Katrina could. “Katrina Weldon’s line, may I ask who’s calling? Hmm, I’m not sure, she might have stepped out.” He pretended to search the studio for Katrina in a pantomime Katrina observed with amusement. “It’s Calliope,” he said when he handed over the phone.

“When are you going to get rid of that cretinous boy?” Calliope said.

“Funny. He was just saying the nicest things about you,” Katrina said.

“Really. Maybe he’s all right then. Listen, will you meet me for an early lunch?”

“I guess I can carve out some time,” Katrina said in a reluctant tone, though she was pleased to have a reason to go out. Nevertheless, it pissed her off when people assumed she was available during the day.

They met at a restaurant across the street from Carnegie Hall, midway between Calliope’s apartment on the Upper West Side and Katrina’s studio in Chelsea. Katrina took the subway, Calliope a cab; they arrived at the restaurant at the same time. To show that she was too busy to think about her appearance, Katrina hadn’t changed out of her painting clothes, black leggings and a knee-length black sweater. Calliope was impeccable in a tweedy suit, her dark hair done up in a shining chignon. Katrina’s hair was cut precisely at her chin, and streaked blond so the gray would be less noticeable. Downtown she looked arty; uptown she looked eccentric.

“Why do you wear those eyeglasses?” Calliope said when they sat down. “They make you look like Harry Potter.”

Katrina took off her glasses and looked at them. Framed in black plastic, perfectly round, she had paid a terrific amount for them at a trendy eyewear shop downtown. “These are the latest thing, you just don’t know it,” she said. She opened the menu, though she knew without looking that she would order the Fettucine Alfredo. Calliope would order a salad or bowl of soup, which was why she was thin and Katrina wasn’t. Screw it, Katrina thought, life was short. She ordered a glass of Chardonnay.

“Big news,” Calliope said. “Huge news.” She leaned forward as if imparting a secret, though she spoke in a normal voice. She raised her left hand. A large diamond the shape of an egg twinkled on her ring finger. “I’m getting married.”

“What?” Katrina said. “To whom?”

“Whom do you think?” Calliope said. “To Henrik, of course!”

“Henrik from Vienna?”

“Why are you acting so surprised?” Calliope said. “We’ve been seeing each other for over a year.”

“Long distance,” Katrina said. “I mean, how many times have you actually seen him? You’re not thinking of moving to Vienna?”

Calliope sat back. “Of course I’m moving to Vienna, I love Vienna. I’ve never been married, and I want to be. I deserve a little domestic security at this point in my life, not to mention a dependable sex life.” She smiled at the blushing busboy filling their water glasses who obviously recognized her. “Everything you have, in other words.”

Katrina stared at her. “You can’t.”

Calliope sighed impatiently. “I can, and I’m going to. I thought you’d be happy for me, Katrina.”

“I am happy for you,” Katrina said.

“You don’t look it,” Calliope said. “Unless those are tears of joy, which I don’t think they are.”

Katrina bowed her head dabbed her eyes with her napkin. “This sounds ridiculous, but I imagined you and Gabe would have an affair.”

“What?” Calliope said. “Why?”

“Because if I imagine it, it won’t happen.”

“It wouldn’t anyway!”

“No, no, I didn’t really think it would. You were a stand-in. I can’t explain, it made sense in my mind. I don’t want him to have an affair, but I’m scared he will. If you consciously imagine something, it will never happen. Like imagining the plane crashing before you get on it. It’s the things you don’t think about that happen.” The gabble of other conversations filled her ears; the jarring noise of a dropped tray of plates came from the vicinity of the kitchen. A waiter arrived at their table and introduced himself as Sean.

“I’ll have the arugula salad,” Calliope said without consulting the menu.

“The same,” Katrina said.

“I can’t even pretend to know what you’re talking about,” Calliope said.

“Never mind,” Katrina said. “The tragic thing is I’ll miss you terribly.”

“You will,” Calliope said with satisfaction. “Of course I’ll miss you, too. And just so you know, Gabe’s not my type.”

“He’s better-looking than Henrik,” Katrina said.

“You’ve met Henrik once,” Calliope said. “I think you’re jealous.”

“Of what?” Katrina said. “I have everything you want, you said it yourself.” When a little heap of glistening arugula arrived on a glass plate, she looked at it despondently. She had always felt slightly superior to Calliope with her peripatetic life, flitting from one man to the next, in and out of “love,” never seeing beneath the surface of anything, always just a little bit ridiculous. She remembered that Henrik was a baron. He’d behaved quite haughtily the time she met him.

“Will you be a baroness?” she said.

Calliope smiled. “Nobody uses the title, but yes. Isn’t that a hoot?”

“Such a hoot,” Katrina said.

§

According to the calculator on her phone, if a six-ounce glass of wine contained 144 calories, the three glasses a day that Katrina usually drank added up to 3,024 calories a week, 12,096 a month, 145,152 a year. Divided by 3500, which was the amount of calories that equaled a pound, she could conceivably lose 41 pounds in a year if she didn’t drink another glass of wine. She went to the refrigerator and counted the bottles of wine lying prone and uncorked on the bottom shelf. Four bottles, plus an open one on shelf inside the door. What if she cut down to two glasses a day and skipped breakfasts? Or, still drank three, but skipped breakfast and ate only lettuce for lunch? She took the open bottle of Pinot Grigio out of the fridge and poured herself a glass. Obviously she couldn’t go on the wagon until she’d finished the wine she had.

She stirred a pot of beef stew on the stove. Beef stew was the only really good thing she knew how to make. As well as the stew, she’d prepared scalloped potatoes; she’d found the recipe online that afternoon and sent Jeremy to buy the potatoes. Before he left for the evening, he’d asked if he could bring a few of his paintings to the studio for her “feedback,” a word she hated. She’d said okay because he’d gone out for the potatoes, which he’d had a perfect right to refuse to do, but she had no desire whatsoever to talk to him about his work; at this stage in her life she had only so many shits to give, and none of them were for Jeremy.

She settled down in the living room with a fresh glass of wine to watch the national news. It was, as usual, shocking and depressing, so she surfed the channels until she found something intriguing, a dewy-skinned young woman twisting a hank of her hair around her finger and crying inconsolably.  Nubile was the word that flowered in Katrina’s mind.

“He kissed me at the end of our date and said he wanted to see me again,” the girl said. “Ashley isn’t that pretty, I’m prettier than she is. I don’t think she loves Kyle, I think she just wants him to choose her. I thought me and him were really good together.”

“He and I,” Katrina shouted at the television. What idiots people were. She got up to check on the potatoes. Just as she closed the oven door, Gabe walked in.

“Perfect timing,” she said.

He widened his eyes. “You’re cooking dinner?”

“Why the face? I cook all the time.”

“You order,” he said. “Different.”

“Either way, we have dinner.”

Gabe opened a bottle of Merlot, and they sat down at the dining room table. Usually it was piled with books and papers and empty mail order boxes, a way station for all the crap they didn’t want to immediately deal with, but Katrina had cleared the mess and set the table with china she’d unearthed from their storage space in the basement of the building.

She ran her finger around the gilded rim of her plate. “Gabe, remember these?”

“You mean the plates?” Gabe said. “No, should I?”

“They’re from our wedding china. We picked them out together.”

He pushed his food aside and examined the plate’s pattern of dinky pink flowers. “No way I picked this out, it looks like something my grandmother would have had.”

“You did too,” Katrina said. “We went to Tiffany and registered for them. I was reminded of them because our twenty-fifth anniversary is coming up.” She put down her fork and clasped her hands beneath her chin. “I had the most marvelous idea. I think we should renew our vows.”

Gabe opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. Then he smiled. “Let’s do. Let’s quote soft rock lyrics to each other under a floral arch at some cheesy Caribbean resort, and make all our friends spend thousands of dollars to get there. It’ll be so special, don’t you think?” He laughed delightedly.

“I’m serious!” Katrina said. “I think it would be lovely. We could do it here, invite just a few close friends…” She had in fact been thinking of a ceremony at some island venue, an ocean breeze playing with the hem of her dress, a large audience of their friends looking on.

“What a nauseating idea,” Gabe said. They sat in silence, eating their stew.

“It makes me sad,” Katrina said after a while.

“What does,” Gabe said.

“That you find the idea of marrying me again nauseating. But of course you do, why wouldn’t you? I’m hideous.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Katrina, stop it,” Gabe said. “I didn’t say you’re hideous.”

“But you think it,” she said.

“No, but I tell you what I do think, I think you’ve had too much to drink.”

Katrina looked at her half-empty glass. “Calliope is getting married to that Austrian baron.”

“Is she? Ah. So that’s what this is about,” he said.

“No, it’s not, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.” She hadn’t thought of it until that afternoon. “It would be an opportunity to refresh our relationship.” She reached out and caressed his cheek, his five o’clock shadow rasping the back of her hand.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. “I have to take this,” he said. He stood and walked away from the table. “No, not at all,” Katrina heard him say from the living room before the conversation devolved into a murmur. She drained her glass, poured herself another, and sipped it while she waited for him to return. After fifteen minutes, she went into the living room. He was watching a movie on TV.

“Let’s have sex,” she said. He looked up at her.

“You’re drunk,” he said. “Go to bed.”

She stared at him. He stared at the TV. What she needed, she thought, was a dog.

§

She had a cracking, poisonous hangover that she’d hidden from Gabe by leaving for the studio while he was still in the shower. Drinking a large cappuccino with an extra shot of espresso, she scrolled blearily through pictures of Morkie puppies. A Morkie would be adoring and fit in a bag so she could take it wherever she wanted, like one of those little oxygen tanks old people carried when they were forced to be out in the world. She’d had a cocker spaniel as a child, a nasty biter, that ultimately had to be euthanized because it attacked a neighborhood child. She put her head down on her worktable and wondered if she would vomit. She felt a hand on her back. The room reeled as she sat up.

“Katrina? Are you okay?” Jeremy said.

“Of course I am, I’m just thinking is all. What are you doing here, Jeremy? Today’s not your day.”

“Yes, it is. We changed my schedule, remember?”

She had no memory whatsoever of changing Jeremy’s days. “Oh, yes, of course. But I don’t need you today, you can go.”

Beneath his dark coat, Jeremy’s body seemed to sag. “But I brought in my paintings for you to look at.”

“Right!” Katrina said.  She did remember that.

He shouldered out of his coat and began to extricate the paintings from layers of plastic bubble wrap and packing tape. “These are from this semester,” he said excitedly. “I think I’ve hit a groove, you know? For the first time, I feel I’ve achieved some mastery instead of just throwing paint around and wondering what the hell.”

“Well, wondering what the hell goes with the territory,” Katrina said. “You don’t want to lose that entirely.” She wondered if she could ask him to go out and get her another coffee. He was smiling for once, showing his awful teeth. He must have come from a background where orthodontia wasn’t a priority.

“Tell me, Jeremy, what do your parents think of you pursuing a career in art?”

“They’re totally against it,” he said. “I haven’t seen them since I moved here. They’re like, come home when you’re ready to do something with your life.”

Katrina nodded. “Where are you from?”

“Renson, Missouri. You’ve never heard of it.”

“No, I haven’t,” she admitted.

He dug his hands into the deep pockets of his pants. “It’s one of those towns where half the population is addicted to Oxy. I used in high school. But then my best friend died of an overdose and it scared me. I’ve been clean ever since.”

Katrina looked at him. She wasn’t even sure of his last name. James or Jones, something alliterative and simple. “Okay, let’s see your paintings,” she said, and he began again to unwrap them. One emerged, then another, finally a third.

“It’s a triptych,” he said shyly. “They’re meant to go together.”

“I can see that,” she said.

“What do you think?” he said. His face was pale, his jaw set as if braced for a blow.

She rolled her chair closer to examine each, and then rolled away to view them as a whole. They were a study in controlled chaos, the strokes of the brush sure and bold and glowing with exuberance, connecting here and breaking there, bridges and rivers and highways of color in magical combinations. The paintings hit a satisfying spot, brought forth a recognition. They reached a destination that had eluded her for thirty years. He was terribly gifted, this Jeremey James or Jones. She had never thought very deeply about her work, but she recognized what she didn’t have.

“You don’t really have to be all that talented, Jeremy.” She took her wallet out of her purse and handed him a ten. “You just have to be lucky.”

He looked his paintings; he looked at her.

“Go get us a couple of coffees, will you?”

Wordlessly, he took the money and left. When she heard the ping of the elevator door, she gently laid her head back down on the desk and wished she’d asked him to get her a muffin.

Louise Marburg is the author of a collection of stories, The Truth About Me, which was named by the San Francisco Chronicle and Entropy as a best book of 2017, won the Independent Publishers Book Awards Gold Medal for short story collections, and was shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize. Her work has appeared in such publications as Narrative, The Southampton Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and many others. Her latest collection of stories, No Diving Allowed, is forthcoming in 2021.