The New Car and The Last Poem

It was the classic tale: Tim loved his wife, and his wife loved his money.

It hadn’t always been this way. When they had first met, Tim was unemployed. He was fresh out of college, bright, enthusiastic, and wretchedly poor. He survived only by living off the kindness of his friends, with no recompense to offer but hugs and promises of repayment.

“Just wait. When I’m a rich author someday, I’ll pay you back triple!” He would say. And he meant it.

Dana had a job as a waitress. When she met Tim at a party, she fell recklessly in love. At first, she thought this was very odd. She had always chased after the big, burly men that had hair on their chests and jail time under their belts. But what she felt for the thin, innocent, bespectacled man completely transcended biker-boy lust. She was in love with the way he talked, with the way he breathed, and with the way that he thought. Somehow, days after their first meeting, she was intimately familiar with the most basic building blocks of his existence, the very stuff that made him the man that he was.

And so they were married. They lived in an apartment that was more like a broom closet with a sink and a stove. They ate two square meals a day, and more often than not these meals consisted of water and cold spaghettiOs. But the conversations they shared over such feasts were filled with laughter and smiles. The two thought they could survive this way forever, as long as they had each other.

Tim’s career as a fiction writer didn’t “take off,” as people normally say of such things; it exploded. With the revenue from his first three books alone, he was able to move himself and his wife into a deluxe apartment in the best part of the city. The books kept coming out of Tim’s head, and the money kept pouring into the bank. Tim could finally afford to give Dana all the nice things she had always deserved.

And that was the problem. Dana knew that she had always deserved nice things. Once Tim became successful, it was as if she finally came to the realization that she had been short-changed her entire life. Was she about to let the world get away with this injustice? Hell no. She proceeded, on principal of fairness, to slavishly pursue every expensive thing that could ever make a woman happy.

As time passed, and as Tim wrote more books (and just as many scripts for movies), Dana continued to change. Each dollar in her pocket made her forget a little part of why she had loved her husband so fiercely. By the time the couple purchased and moved into a beachside mini-mansion, Dana had completely lost that untraceable attraction that had once bound her so unexpectedly to her man. All that she was left with was disdain for the scrawny, balding, saggy ATM machine that was her spouse.

Tim did everything he could to remind his wife of what they once had. He would scribble poems for her on napkins, leaving them in her purse in the morning when he left for work, just like he did when they were young. She never once thanked him for these surprises, or even mentioned them at all. Tim suspected she was throwing them away. She was. He continued writing them for her anyway.

As one can imagine, Dana’s lust for high-dollar items always peaked during the Christmas season. She took infinite pleasure in recounting the gifts she had asked for when she was a girl- a Barbie, a new hair brush, a pair of skates like the neighbor girl had- and comparing them to the things she received now. How stupid and childish those things all seemed, when compared to in-ground swimming pools, Gucci Genius Jeans, and diamonds! So, in order to make up for the embarrassing mistake of enjoying cheap plastic dolls in her childhood, she demanded increasingly extravagant gifts from Tim.

One Christmas in particular, the first celebrated in their new tropical home, Dana decided she wanted a car. Not just any Ford POS ’06, mind you. Dana’s hands ached to grasp the steering wheel of a brand new Maybach 57 S. Price tag: $367,000 USD.

First, Dana tried dropping subtle hints. “Did you see that car in Spielberg’s last movie? The one the bad guy drove? Wasn’t it gorgeous?” Or, “I felt so plain driving to the mall the today, Tim. Every redneck in Florida owns a Porsche! It’s embarrassing!” Tim, however, didn’t want to discuss his wife’s desire for a new auto. He was more concerned with talking about current events, or asking how his wife’s day had been. What a dull man. Dana thought. Can’t he take a hint?

It soon became obvious to Dana that subtlety was getting her nowhere. Her next plan was more aggressive: the seduction of her husband.

“Timothy,” she cooed in his ear, stroking his back lightly with the tips of her fingers. “What are you going to get me for Christmas?” Her hand slid over the border that divided back from front, north from south. But when he rolled over to take her, grinning with animal lust, she couldn’t go through with it. Turning away, Dana muttered something about remembering an early coffee date with a friend. Dejected and confused, Tim rolled over and left her alone. Dana decided then and there that she would rather drive her shitty Porsche for the rest of her life than let that old, bald skeleton mount her.

It was Christmas Eve when Dana lost all control. Tim had continued to show no interest in Dana’s latest, most urgent desire, and almost certainly had not purchased for her a new Maybach 57 S. Now he would pay. An explosive argument began.

“You ungrateful jerk! How dare you call me selfish?! How dare you?! You’d be nothing without me! It was me who sheltered you and fed you, back when you were a pathetic, mewling excuse for a writer. And what thanks did you give me? What do you still give me? Poems! Cards! Stories! We didn’t need any of that shit, Tim! We needed money! But you didn’t care about that. You just sat at home, typing away on your stupid little typewriter, working on your idiotic stories, while I slaved all day to keep us alive! Was that selfish of me, Tim? Was it?!” Her breaths were short and fast. Her nostrils flared and her eyes threw stones. “And now that we have money, you still can’t do any better for me! You keep putting those damn napkins in my purse, as if I wanted that shit!”

Tim’s eyes were hazy. He stammered and stuttered, searching for something to say in retort, but it was no use. Dana had pulverized him; stripped him of all his weapons. He wanted to ask her if she had always felt this way. He wanted to ask her if she had even once bothered to read any of the poems he had written her. Most of all, he wanted to know when she had stopped loving him.

* * *

Dana woke up Christmas morning, alone in her bed. Tim must have spent the night at a hotel, she thought as she roused her aging body. She shuffled downstairs to the kitchen, rubbing her eyes and thinking about the things she had said to her husband the previous day. She felt a small speck of guilt for the way she had treated Tim. Even though she had meant every awful word she had said, there are some things that even Dana knew a person should never have to hear. I didn’t need to go so far, she conceded. I’ll apologize as soon as he gets home. It is Christmas, after all.

Upon entering the kitchen, Dana heard a noise. A car was idling in the garage.

Good. He must have just gotten home.

In the spirit of making amends, Dana began making a pot of coffee for the two of them. However, something was not right. After several minutes the pot was on, and Dana could still hear the car engine running.

Just what is he up to?

Dana walked to the door that led to the garage. She opened it cautiously. A cry of joy fled her lips, and was quickly transformed into a scream of horror.

There in front of her, parked neatly and humming readily, shone a brand new Maybach 57 S. Tim was slumped limply in the driver’s seat. Where his ear should have been there was a gaping maw; his nightshirt was stained red.

The world rose up beneath Dana, catching her as she fell.

***
Dana sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in a blanket. Two police officers stood beside her, attempting to question her without much success. More officers were busy with the “scene” in the garage. Their voices were audible in the kitchen.

An elderly officer walked slowly, determinedly into the kitchen and asked Dana’s interrogators to leave. When they had gone, the officer seated himself at the table. In his hand he held a piece of paper inside of a plastic bag.

“We found this in his pocket when we searched him,” the officer began. He took a tired breath and reluctantly clarified, “it’s a poem.”

Dana looked at the bagged paper. The policeman held it gingerly with two fingers, as if it were something dirty or indecent. She didn’t need to interpret the look in his face. She had never been more frightened of anything in her entire life.

“Anyway, we-“ the officer stopped, chose his words. “We think he wrote it for you.”

Of course he did, Dana thought. The blood was fleeing her face, her hands, and her legs.

“It’s evidence, so I can’t give it to you.” The officer then placed the awful thing on the table in front of Dana, blank side up. She stared at the bag as if it were a snake prepared to strike. “But I can let you read it, in the bag, before I take it away.” His job over, the officer sat up and exited the kitchen much more quickly and readily than he had entered it.

***

Half an hour later, the elderly officer reentered the kitchen. Dana was gone, and the note was still face down on the table. He picked it up, making sure his eyes didn’t so much as catch a glimpse of the words on the other side.

Not again, he vowed to himself.

As he left the kitchen, the veteran policeman found himself wondering if the widow had even read the poem. She hadn’t.