Transfigured Night

My new boss, Chick, was a morbidly obese manic off his meds who hailed from a tiny town I’d never heard of—Wassily, Louisiana—a town so small, Chick claimed, the shotgun shacks only had space for pistols. In summers, he told me, you wished for a pistol to shoot your wife or maybe end it all, what with the stillborn air, the chiggers, the mold. I told him my family had lived without air-conditioning in DC until I was nine, so I knew something about swampy heat. He didn’t respond—he practically ignored me—and I didn’t mention the tiny brick house, which was still superior to anything that might be called a shack.

Chick was a private consultant, but what anyone might be consulting him about was a mystery. I kept his calendar, I wrote his correspondence, I made charts, and I brought him foot-long Italian subs for lunch, dripping with oil and vinegar and shedding lettuce, which he consumed in three large bites. He was a neat eater, though. When he was done, no evidence remained because he always disposed of his food trash in my office garbage can instead of his. He’d walk into my office on some pretense, holding the crumpled oily brown paper and the Styrofoam clamshell, slyly drop it in the trash, and leave. I’d smell mortadella for the rest of the day.

Working for Chick was a serious demotion from the work I’d been doing at Furlong, a defense contractor, but I’d had to find something else quickly. It was for a good reason: I was getting married.

I met Devin at Furlong. He was an engineer with a high-level security clearance. Before we were engaged, he designed an airplane that flew sorties in Desert Storm. There was a scale model on the coffee table in what used to be Devin’s but what was now our apartment. I’d teased him about the plane being a design feature in the apartment and suggested we hang an open parachute from the ceiling. Devin wasn’t amused. I was proud of him about the plane, even though I hadn’t agreed with the war, which everyone seemed to know was only about Kuwait’s oil, but at Furlong we pretended that it wasn’t, that it had been a noble cause.

Our boss at Furlong gave us symphony tickets for a wedding gift, a season of concerts to go with our newlywed year. He also gave us a letter that said one of us had to leave. The company didn’t allow employees to be married; it was a security risk. I laughed when I read that part—“security risk.” Because wasn’t it a security risk to draw diagrams of military planes while in the audience at a concert hall? Devin never knew when he’d get an idea for a project he was working on. Even at the symphony, he’d scribble these diagrams in the program, then tear out the pages and stick them in his suit jacket. I’d find the pages when I took the jacket to the cleaners. He’d come home from work and say, “Have you seen—” And I’d say, “Sorry, I sold them to the Russians,” and then I’d hand him the papers.

I was the one who left Furlong, because I was only an assistant. I wasn’t broken up about leaving, but it was unfair. Devin might have at least offered to be the one to go. Even if he didn’t mean it, and we both knew it would be the wrong decision. The thing about Devin, he was always just exactly who he was. To suggest something he didn’t mean to follow through on wouldn’t even occur to him. He wouldn’t have understood the point. This was one of the qualities I liked about him when we first started dating. I still did. Most of the time.

“Maybe we shouldn’t get married,” I’d said to Devin when we...