An Excerpt from Joan Frank’s New Novel, THE OUTLOOK FOR EARTHLINGS

Mel and Sol must have recognized one another from the start. 

Chemicals—bio-signals?—telegraphed; moved them toward one another in ancient, primal ways. Scarlet wished to God she could cheer for the sermon on the mount. Easy to say I am glad you are happy. Harder by far, it seemed, to cheer the apparatus of happiness. She drew up bluejeaned legs, hugged her knees. 

Mel insisted she was happy. Scarlet didn’t buy it. Some fat lie lay coiled like a python in the engine room of that story. From the beginning Mel endured Sol’s vanities, his dogma, his pronouncements, though much of it whipped her bloody. His laying down of absolutes. I don’t have affairs, I have relationships. On and on he talked about how he loved his wife, the golden angel Winnie. Never dreaming it might pain the mistress at his knee every Saturday, who smiled whilst his words stabbed her in the head, over and over. Smiled as she bade him goodbye, softly shutting the door. Then the smile fell off. Scarlet knew this from years of e-mail, before Mel stopped reporting. Once Mel had actually slipped into a clarinet concert of Winnie’s, come home, and wept. She would never, never allow him to know. 

What was Scarlet to do? 

Witness. 

Cheer. 

Cheer when she could.

…

Sol had everything. Authority, wisdom, money. Devoted slave-wife. Adoring female 

students. Perfect control. Except, Mel said, his grown children were having trouble. Stumbling in the world. Surprise surprise, thought Scarlet bitterly. Sol’s response to his children’s trouble, according to Mel, was characteristic. He would swoop in on them—drove up to their homes announced, wifey Winnie alongside him in the car like Robin to his Batman. Squared off theatrically with his kids and their spouses, confronting them with some sort of moral reprimand or ultimatum—until someone fled the room in anger or tears. Then he took his wife by the arm and drove off, head erect. Or he withheld his visits, a royal withdrawal. Wrote long letters instead, detailing his philosophy of life in many single-spaced pages. His wife’s responses to the children’s distress? Sol doesn’t say. Winifred Armantino, from what Mel had gathered, was reared in North Dakota. Lines of demarcation were clear: Husband king. Head never higher than his, Mel had once murmured, a line from The King and I, making Scarlet laugh at the time. 

Winnie claimed an art of her own. This, it was gathered, somehow saved and excused her.

Clarinet with the city symphony, later a wind ensemble called Scarborough Faire. 

Sol had confided to Mel that his wife did not understand the music she played as well as he did, though course he’d never suggested that to her, and though he himself did not read musical notation. It was the music’s spiritual core he understood, saw into, far more deeply. 

As she aged, Winnie stopped her public performances, giving private lessons. Then those, too, fell away. She puttered now, saw to the household—a villa on a hill, overlooking a pear orchard. Perhaps she even cleaned the villa herself, though Mel doubted that. They had money. 

Winnie’s great task was to minister to Sol. She would burst into his home office when she wished to show him something that delighted her—an ad for a yogurt maker, or a new diet. He always let Winnie interrupt him, he repeatedly told Mel, because her heart was so innocent. Once he’d upbraided his wife, he admitted, about an improperly baked potato from the microwave. This was an image Mel never, ever forgot—nor, on hearing it, did Scarlet, silently thanking God Mel had been spared marriage to this man. Always, Sol praised Winnie to Mel. Hours of praise, months, years of it. Elaborate descriptions, soaked in amused affection. Diets, gardening, a program she’d seen on television. More diets. Cabbage soup, grapefruit, lemon and honey. He told Mel many times how much weight Winnie had lost. Mel listened, smiling. She herself had always gained weight effortlessly, fought food cravings all her life, and now, exacerbated by chemo and countless medications, had grown wide, doughy, puffy. 

Scarlet though it stunning that a gifted man could behave this way. Sol appeared to have no glimmer he was cutting his lover to internal ribbons with adoring reports of his wife’s weight losses. Year after year Sol marveled over his beloved Winnie, chuckled aloud at her endearing foibles. Mel listened with luminous eyes; asked fond questions. Chuckled with him at his wife’s childlike qualities, at the purity of her heart. 

When Sol went home Mel fell into bed. 

Scarlet rubbed her hands against the tops of her thighs. 

Mel wants it this way. 

Wants? 

Accepts. And why, cannot matter. Not to you, not anymore. And not out loud.