Ashley Erwin

Chapter 1 of Woman on the Screen

They say there are 3 sides to everyone.  A public self, a private self, and a secret self.  When Harmony Blake went on air on Thursday, March the 4th, her husband was already dead, and for the first time, the world got a glimpse of her very private self in a very public arena.

They’d met 28 years ago in an Irish Pub back when Buckhead was lined with bars.  She with a group of friends just out of John Mercer Law, him just off a bar shift nearby.  She’d clocked him soon as he walked through the door.  Bathwater warm on an Atlanta night with sweat pooling in crevices and throats thirsting for sips of cold beer. 

She was bored.  Per usual.  Per usual conversation of summering down in Hilton Head, of trading golf stories against polo country club dreams.  Per usual boring discourse about financial portfolios and stocks.  She was already checked out ten minutes into her second drink.  Her head leaning against a stone pillar, the divider separating her side of the bar and theirs when HE walked up and ordered, a Brando-smoke-just-hanging from his lips begging for a light.

The thing about growing up for girls like her, girls interested in why things work, with noses shoved down in books, with thighs that didn’t fill out until 18 and a face that looked for the majority of her youth awkward like a doll not quite grown in, she’d not had all that much exposure to men, not been placed in areas where language traded in grunts and groans and shoves.  All the men she’d ever known were teachers, students, Doctors, lawyers, men who held doors and knew better than to stare too long. 

And then there was him.  He looked like he’d never asked for a kiss in his life, like his lips didn’t know any verbs other than take, like his tanned forearms hadn’t spent not one single summer in a library shoved in a book.  No, he smelled of sports and sweat, of grass and work, and his biceps said he could lift her without thinking twice and carry her over his shoulder to places she shouldn’t go.  Tall and slightly trashy like he could give a punch, like he fucked in parking lots.  She’d never spoken to a boy like that, never been allowed around someone like that.

She watched him from across the bar, from the peephole of that stone pillar as he mimicked a story to three hooligans pointing and laughing completely unaware, completely their own in the night. 

Before she even realized what was happening, she was licking her lips.  Physically licking her lips.  As if in a state of overwhelmed and in public no less — clutch my pearls. 

Without even thinking, she was already imagining what his callused hands would feel like on her soft skin, what his fingers would do to her thighs.  It was Pavlovian how fast she skipped to what his lips would taste like and whether his sweat more salty than sweet.  It was draconian how soon she wondered if his place had a mattress on the floor and what it would be like to pull from cushion to carpet as he suffocated himself inside her legs.  Oh, how very badly did she want to know what his nose felt like as she sat across his face.  Heaven help us!

“Harmony, don’t you think,” co-worker Tom slid close to her, his fingers grazing her shoulder, his intentions apparent ever since she joined the law firm two months back. 

Oh, she thought many things.  Things that would make present company blush, yearnings that would clear a room, desires of the immediate that quickened her breath and necessitated a response that Tom would not like.  Tom, who so desperately wanted to transition their work-life-relationship to some more approximating floor-clothes-situation, but she never did enjoy the low hanging fruit.  What was the point? 

Even when young, Harmony secretly was drawn to the lions in the pictures, to the hyenas, and tigers.  To the things that hunt and lurk in the dark.  Waiting.  Watching.  Patiently.  A mind full of creativity what the psychiatrist said.  A polite way to put precocious, to place velvet on aggressive, to pad Harmony’s twisting’s of reality into fine fitted, nice boxes.  What is it that Bolelli says “All empires are built on bloodshed and brutality,” she was no different, that’s why she would eventually get into the news!  A particular capability to connect the dots, to craft a story that’s what her grade schoolteacher, Mrs. Flanders wrote on the official report.  Never mind you, the part she left out, the broken vase, the missing book, the shard of glass.  Small towns love a secret more than a beauty pageant, they fucking feed off of them.

“Harmony, why don’t you weigh in.”  There he was again.  Tom.  Begging for approval, for validation, for any sign in hell that he had a shot.  That all that hard work he’d been putting in, asking after her childhood in the law firm kitchen worthwhile.  Hadn’t his inquiries about the Blake family mortuary and her relationship with her dad been considerate.  That’s what he wanted her to think, wasn’t it.  That he, the type of guy she could trust.  What if she shouldn’t be trusted, Tom.  What then?    

Tom was the rat dropped into the snake case, a necessary feeding but not something to be remembered.  Animals don’t get thrills from the meat put in front of them, it’s the stalking they enjoy, the pursuit, hell why do you think Tom’s trying so hard at it, but all Harmony can think on is the man in the undershirt.  What he owned.  What ink hides underneath that soft white cotton painting his shoulder, how the crevices of his hips probably dip deep just above his belt buckle.  Wondered if he had a motorcycle.  He looked like he had a motorcycle.  Looked like he had grease under his fingernails that would never wash clean, that he was meant for the open road and for no rules and she knew that he was a type to get lost in or better yet to lose, perhaps even get lost too.  And as she slipped deeper and deeper into this spiral, this staircase to her secret deep, he looked up at her. 

For the first time.  For all of time.  As if stopped still.  Frozen.

Without even thinking, Harmony brought her hand up to boring Tom’s face, who was still talking at her, still running his mouth about something and slapped him across the cheek.  Hard.  So hard the blood stung under the skin and her fingers quivered and she’d done it all—

while never leaving the gaze of the man in the white undershirt who winked as her hand grew red.

They say the secret self never sees the light of day, it’s the thing you wouldn’t even whisper to your spouse after 30 years of marriage, the thing you barely have the courage to admit to yourself, but it is a thing, at times, that you will openly admit to a perfect stranger.  Sometimes even without muttering the words, sometimes with tight lips and kitty cat bedroom eyes, and better yet sometimes with movement alone. 

Harmony needed to cool her hand.  She needed to get away from Tom, who was yelling into the void next to her and the silly junior lawyer gifting comfort by barking at the bartender for some ice like no one has ever gotten cold cocked in the face before in an Irish Pub —How very pedestrian— She wanted away from these boring people and salvation sat dripping in between the hands of the man in the white undershirt who refused to peel his eyes from her ever since she caught his glance.  

It was reactionary to storm her chair and move towards him.  A compulsion drifting from her secret self, telling the world be damned, shouting eat it to decorum altogether.  But it was necessity that propelled her striking hand towards his and the beer it held, and it was perhaps something deeper than even she wanted to admit, but if she were to stand in a room alone with the lights out, and truly ask, desire would whisper behind her lips.  That’s what drove her to pick up his beer and gulp it down, letting the liquid drip from her mouth, gliding down her chin, and spill over her chest onto a silk blouse. 

“I would’ve bought you a beer,” he said.

“I would’ve taken yours anyway.”

And just like that, he grabbed her hand and pulled her out of that dreary place into the steamy Atlanta night.  No words, just frenzied and feral and ready for react.  He coaxed her behind the back alley of the bar, stringing her past two bartenders on fives desperately trying to place nicotine in their lungs.  She could feel the liquor working, the public self letting go the further and further she got from signs of life.  That impenetrable need to discover him, his taste, his wants, what she’d allow him to do, growing by the minute, by the step even. 

Everybody believes they’re good person, that they’re the hero of the story, that their cause is justifiable, their beliefs above board, their interests actually interesting.  What is the saying — watch a person long enough and they’ll show you who they are.  Harmony Blake knew who Johnny was as soon as she met him.  Soon as he shoved her against that alley wall with flashes of traffic whizzing down Peachtree, as soon as he peeled her thighs apart with his shoulder, absorbing her dress in his mouth, and lifted her leg to rest by his ear.  She knew he was her ticket to boardroom sanity, her rock in the storm of monotony, there’s nothing litigators hate more than a person they can’t buy, and Johnny was un-sale-able. 

On the night they met he ate her like cherry pie until she got so weak, he had to pick her up entirely and with both legs straddled over his back she vowed then and there to try and hide her secret lion from him for the rest of their lives.  But on the day, he died, she knew she’d failed.