Ellie Powell

“We should go up to Salem for the Fourth,” he said. “Catherine will be in town.”

“Catherine,” I replied, “Is not a draw.”

Catherine Callahan was a friend of Henry’s from high school. A month prior, she had confessed her undying love to him over one of their weekly telephone calls (a condition of their friendship which she’d established during the spring semester). As she tells it, he felt quite the same way, but was sure their circumstances would forever keep them apart. Nonetheless, Henry insisted that the two remain friends in what she’d assumed was a characteristic display of his unusually good manners. What had actually happened, I came to learn, was that she’d admitted her crush to him in such a roundabout way that he wasn’t entirely sure what she was talking about at all. To avoid seeming invasive, gentleman that he is, Henry gave her a good-natured pat on the back, and told her he was quite sure the problem—whatever it was—would work itself out in time. He was confused when she asked if she could stay the night with him on a visit to Boston. We chatted over dinner; I enlightened him as to his circumstances.

“Oh dear,” he muttered, “I had thought it possible, but didn’t want to seem paranoid.” A pause. “Or egotistical.”

Edward asks me out four times annually. I always say yes the first time, no the second, yes the third, and no the fourth. We have absolutely nothing in common aside from our each reading Latin, and even this is to vastly different degrees (he’s maintained his far better than I have mine). Edward’s father is a billionaire and Edward’s mother is from a Baltic state.

In the fall, I said I’d go to a party with him at some Beacon Hill apartment, and brought along a friend of mine from Wellesley. Hélène is gorgeous, French, and has never once had a boyfriend. This is only tragic insofar as she’s formed something of an identity around it, and these kinds of identities are rarely all that pleasant. I introduced her as my terribly precocious friend who attended the Los Angeles Lycée Français and now remasters old film scores.

“Right,” he said. “Good.” He has a slight accent.

“Do you have some German music?” she asked.

Edward brought me behind his D.J. equipment almost immediately, leaving Hélène alone with the hoi polloi. I stood there as he fiddled with little metal knobs, whispering tender warnings in my ear before each time he dropped the bass.

My best friend Amanda goes to Amherst College and hates it. She’s spent three of her five semesters studying abroad. She called me recently, dreadfully upset at having realized she has no college friends.

“Where am I going to find bridesmaids?” she cried. I always imagine Amanda in a boat somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland. She studies Classics.

“You could borrow one of my roommates. Choose by hair color.” I live with five women.

“Do you think they’d come?” There is no imminent wedding. There isn’t even an imminent boyfriend.

I started seeing a combination psychiatrist-psychoanalyst in August. We met over the phone for ten minutes before my first appointment so that I could see how much I liked him before forking over a thirty-dollar co-pay. Supposedly, he would also determine from our call whether or not he liked me, but I don’t think psychoanalysts ever really turn people away. 

“I think it’s bipolar disorder,” he said five minutes in. “I’d like to meet you, but I’ll be unavailable for the next three weeks. Is that alright?”

“I’m sorry for the delay, it’s just that I’m going to Tanglewood on Tuesday.”

Henry was (and is—I saw him not an hour ago) 5’6” with the humongous brown eyes of a bush baby. We’d dated very seriously for a business week earlier that year, two days into which he told me that he was in love with me, and four days into which he told me that he’d been dreadfully mistaken. We were good friends beforehand, so the uncoupling was a great shame while it lasted. We began floating back in and out of dating that March, managing some sort of breakup every other week without ever really calling ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend. He bought me a subscription to BritBox for my birthday. It was renewed in May, July, August, and December.

During that first round of togetherness, our friends had said we were perfect for each other. Well into our fourth, they told us we just about deserved each other. I think these are similar enough.

A pause. I am the only other person in the room. “I’m sorry, I have no idea.”

My advisor clicks his tongue, disappointed. “The world, the flesh, and the devil. Your godparents forswore them at your baptism.”

“I have deadbeat godparents. I’m not so sure they came.”

Andy Warhol’s Superstars are competitive with each other long after his death. All having gone on to pursue artistic careers of little luster. They host poorly-attended gallery shows and poetry readings in the college towns they now call home, and maintain unverified Instagram pages which mostly repost the same grainy images of themselves in the Factory every month. They use their own names as hashtags in the captions.

When Brigid Berlin (the fattest muse) died in 2020, Gerard Malanga (the straightest muse) posted a passive-aggressive, paragraphs-long screed in memoriam, of which I have included only the last few sentences below:

“Then, there's the New York Times obituary that appeared 3 days later. I pretty much guessed it would be half a page. Even I got it wrong; it was 2/3rds of a page, 6 columns deep. Wow! Lots of hyperbole, lots of potential pull-quotes, lots of Wow! What's fiction is now fact! Not once can I remember having an intelligent conversation with her about poetry, art, biography & those intellectual pursuits that linger as the golden hour settled into dusk. That's when I pick up a book & read. Brigid had no yearning or patience for those comforting pursuits. She had the gift of gab, like they say. Her intelligence was the intermingling of social innuendo & social prowess. She could hold her own in any conversation so long as she controls the interchange. But that can get a bit boring, after a while. What her obit tells me is that it's a mixed legacy. She was a narcissist, she was an exhibitionist. Would you want your daughter to grow up mimicking Brigid poking herself in the naked butt with a hypodermic syringe filled with speed on the silver screen? I think not. Visually, the width & depth of the obit tells me how lonely she must've felt at journey's end. Happiness was not her thing.

When he broke up with me for the third time, Henry started by quoting 

“I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

It’s not as though I hadn’t thought about our relationship in terms of Sondheim before, it’s just that I’d never thought of it in terms of 

. I always imagined us somewhere closer to 

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Something for everybody—comedy tonight.

The question to open seminar: where does your name come from? The answer was easy—my grandmother’s. The girl next to me said the same. Actually, her given name was constructed to combine both her grandmothers’ names. “So I’m Aldy,” she said, “For Cindy and Althea.”

Joy’s boyfriend cheated on her twice with our state auditor. At least, that’s how Joy sees it. The first time, they were on the campaign trail together. The event was a barbecue in Quincy. Dylan was working for a balding lieutenant gubernatorial candidate and this poor woman had absolutely no staff of her own, so—good Democrat that he is—Dylan offered to film her speech for her. An ally, she decided, and followed him around for the rest of the night. When eventually she grew tired, she asked if she might lean on Dylan’s shoulder. Running a campaign for state auditor is very difficult, you know.

Later that night, Dylan showed me and Joy her speech, telling us that she was the sort of once-in-a-generation talent he got into this business to meet. When pressed, he also told us that he found the candidate very pretty and had liked it when she leaned on him. Dylan slept on our couch that night. I wished he’d gone home to his own.

Eventually, she won. I get push notifications every so often from 

 with her name attached. Women are so embarrassing.

My friend Dalton is in love with the girl who sings next to him in choir. They have sex every Monday and Wednesday after rehearsal. He moons over her. “We all went on a retreat last weekend,” he said, looking into his coffee cup. Abruptly, eye-contact: “Overnight.”

“Well, did anything happen?” I asked.

“Well, I told her this sort of thing usually implodes, and she asked why, and—we were in this little gazebo right in front of the cabin where all the tenors were sleeping, so we had to be very quiet with the whole thing—and I said sometimes people develop feelings for each other.”

Promising. “What did she say?” I pushed.

“She asked me if I had feelings for her.”

“No. I told her I saw her as a friend.” He paused. “I said, ‘A hot friend.’”

“I’m not actually sure about the bipolar,” said my psychoanalyst on the occasion of our first official meeting.

“No. Cyclothymia maybe, but I don’t want to medicate you for it, and I’ll tell you why.” He stood. “You remind me of my good friend Dr. Skip Choate. Skip’s a very productive psychiatrist,” he said. “And lots of fun to talk to.”

The train lurched. Henry tried to stay perfectly still. Supposedly reading, he’d spoken to neither myself nor Catherine since we’d boarded. Periodically, I’d look over his shoulder to find him scanning over the same paragraphs he’d been reading in New London and Providence. I cleaned my nails with the corners of a 

Catherine was a foot shorter than I am. Her thin-lipped mouth was particularly wide, corner to corner, giving her face a froglike quality. I wished she’d put on lipstick. I think when a girl is already wearing eyeliner, she worries adding lipstick will make her look like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. I sort of like Elvira, but they’re not doing their makeup for me.

“You don’t dress like a Gothicist,” she said, turning her head towards me from its spot against the window.

It’s a mean question—I knew what she meant.

I had to attend the start of a lecture series on gender diversity in the arts last week. The host, a community organizer of sorts, began his introduction of the first speaker with a description of his own appearance. “For the visually impaired,” Mary-Ann later told me. Mary-Ann, whom I met in a women’s group some years back, is the perfect guest for a lecture series because she takes notes on everything, bringing a little green diary with her to the vet, the movies, the nail salon, and the coffee date. She says men find it endearing until consummation.

“My name is Carver Pike,” he said, “And I am a white man of medium height and build. I have brown eyes and brown hair.” Charitably, Carver Pike’s hair could be called salt-and-pepper, with its most accurate modifier clearly being gray. 

There’s a group online called the Richard III Society. They are neither a theater troupe nor a sort of British Lincoln Project, but rather a club dedicated to the reappraisal of King Richard III’s legacy. The play was, it seemed, bad press. 

Thus far, their largest undertaking this century has been commissioning two psychologists from the University of Leicester to shrink posthumously the good king’s head. Published in their monthly bulletin, the analysis was certainly thorough, with large-font headings sprinkled throughout the paper along the lines of “Machiavellianism,” “Cowardice,” and “Murderous Psychopath?” Their conclusion: Richard III suffered from social anxiety. With large-font headings like that, I think I might too.

Between classes, I work with a former U. S. Marine. Not closely, but in the same department. I don’t think he knows my name, and I only know his because he was recently pictured in a local newspaper which I read with some frequency (commenting on the Palmyra recall vote; very little to say there). This afternoon, he was trying to move a table. I was in the way. Briefly, we made eye contact.

After our last breakup, Henry left the country for some Viennese study abroad program.

In total, I sent him a single letter clarifying that I would not. This came only after he sent me invitations to subscribe to a multiplicity of self-published newsletters, each designed to show us poor Americans exactly what we were missing (him, apparently). I received a lengthy response in the mail, which Henry began by stating that he had treated me poorly and I was right to feel upset about it. 

, I might have written back. I would have meant it.

Mary-Ann says I date with a rolodex—that, in my freshman year of college, I met five men, and have recycled them in some sort of order ever since. If pressed, we could each name the five (two are called Charlie) and we could each explain the order (the Charlies are first). Best to remove a card every once in a while, I think. How else will I know whom I should marry?

“I don’t really feel all that much like a twenty-year-old girl, though, I usually feel kind of like Woody Allen.”

“Jesus. Woody Allen. I mean, it’s not Hitler, but it’s up there. Woody Allen. What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie?”

“Annie Hall! Of course your favorite Woody Allen movie is Annie Hall. I could have guessed that.”

“But I could have! Anybody could have! Hey, Steph—Steph, what’s her favorite Woody Allen movie? Annie Hall! Of course it’s Annie Hall!”

Ellie Powell

Ellie Powell

Fiction

Spring 2024

My State Auditor, the Other Woman