The Blessings of Revenge

Jonathan Turner shrugged into his gold-buttoned, dark blue suit jacket, rubbed the balding brown and gray pate on top of his bony head and sighed dejectedly as he thought about how often he’d tried to make the best of things. He adjusted his silver satin tie and contemplated the emptiness of a life he’d once assumed would be so fulfilling and felt a familiar upsurge of bile when he reflected upon it all; the inane students he was forced to help in ways that often both annoyed and enraged him. He was tired of dealing with people who didn’t see what he saw, dream what he dreamed, love what he loved, or understand what he did. Escape was a concept he always considered but never equated as something feasible. Not with three extra mouths to feed in the house he was supposed to consider home.

Just thinking about it elicited the familiar well inside his thin chest he was so practiced at tamping down, at least for the most part. There were times when he snapped at a particularly dim witted student, one of the many who didn’t even belong in a community college, for God’s sake, or gave a cold response to one of his equally dim witted teenaged daughters who obviously had the misfortune of receiving mostly nothing from his more desirable genetics, but mostly no one knew how he really felt, how he went through his days in a haze of bitter judgement against those around him. He made sure they didn’t.

That was why, when he unlocked his front door one night to an almost-empty house after stepping out of his silver Lexus, he was completely shocked and even more enraged than usual. He hadn’t seen it coming and that never happened in his life-never. He was reading the paper when he walked in, didn’t even raise his head as he threw his bunch of keys on the hall table and walked further into the house. It took him too long to realize the keys hadn’t hit any table. They’d hit the floor. He whirled around, paper down and at his thigh, and gaped.

Brow furrowed, rage spewing forth like it had never been allowed to before, he ran from room to room as it bubbled and spilled over into curses, utterances that before had only been said in the dark recesses of his mind. By the time he stood on the back patio, on an empty slab of concrete where before there had been a table with a dark blue umbrella surrounded by similarly dark blue, cushy chairs, he was screaming obscenities loudly enough that the neighbors on either side glanced out of their respective homes, widened their eyes, and hastily retreated behind their own glass windows and bolted doors, where they were safe from the likes of Jonathon Turner.

When the obscenities dissipated and he was left heaving and puffing as if he’d run some sort of marathon, Jonathon retreated behind the walls of what had been his home and stood in the middle of what had been the living room, and he stared at the blank walls where portraits and pictures, mainly of the two young women who were his daughters, once hung and decorated what he considered to be an otherwise bland motif. Cheryl insisted on neutral colors which both bored and repulsed Jonathon, but he always let her have her way so he said nothing when she bought a tan couch, white chairs, tan curtains. He hid his disdain behind newspapers and books and went on business trips as often as he could, to lectures and month-long sabbaticals and whatnot, just so he wouldn’t have to return to this very room with its infuriating neutral colors.

Then he gasped, a short breath inhaled through capped teeth, and he whirled around, pouring sweat in the Armani he was so proud of. He ran awkwardly into a room adjacent to the empty one, stopping short, arms out, and his hazel eyes, widened with shock, took in his surroundings. The bitch hadn’t touched it, not any of it.

Heart still thudding, he wandered around and took mental inventory of the possessions in this, his home office of sorts. It was his own abode, dark and rich with mahogany and russet and deep umber colors, an island of bliss in a sea of mediocrity. It was all untouched. He fingered leather-bound first editions of treasured literature, ran his hands across rare archeological treasures of questionable legal standing, flipped through documents necessary for other sundry questionable business endeavors, and was relieved but not. He felt spent as he shuffled around in the rest of the mostly empty house, a shell of what it once was. His clothes were there, in his mahogany dresser obtained from one of his Italian sojourns, as were all of his own personal possessions, anything he could have called his and only his.

And now here he stood in all his glory, surrounded by nothing but neutral-colored carpeting and beige walls and an obvious way out of what he considered the drudgery of a life not well lived at all. Yet for some reason, he wasn’t happy, not at all. Sitting on the floor in an empty living room with a tumbler of whisky and a shot glass in his hand, he suddenly flashed on why. Damn her, the bitch. He sat with his lovely silver satin tie askew and knew without a doubt that it was her who was responsible. She was the reason he wasn’t happy.

In a whish of motion he lifted an arm and threw the shot glass at the opposite wall with a force that shattered it upon impact. He sat and growled under his breath, eyes slitted and red-rimmed as he pondered in sullen drunkenness about how he’d make her pay, how he’d strip her of everything she held dear to her, including the brats, damn her. “That’ll show her good,” he mumbled as his head nodded and he drifted off into the slumber of the inebriated.

Jonathon Turner slept, that night, on the floor in a crumpled heap in a wrinkled Armani suit, snoring intermittently and dreaming about blessed revenge. At one point, in his sleep, he smiled.