LORDS A-LEAPING

by Sarah Crysl Akhtar

It's not so uncommon at holiday time, but —

"…folie à trois," said Halko. "Three lords a-leaping."

He was already at the club, relaxed, comfortable, when the others arrived for a restorative drink. He hadn't gone to the funerals. No one could remember how he first intersected their circle. His membership privileges derived from a reciprocal arrangement with a comparable establishment somewhere else.

They were a rough bunch under their Egyptian cotton wing-collars but Halko unnerved them. They couldn't figure out his angle and it made them doubt their own game.

His urbanity was authentic despite those bluntly rectangular workman's hands. He had steel-colored hair like a Prussian officer's allowed to grow slightly out of regulation.

He didn't go in for baubles. His watch and wedding ring were good solid pieces. He never wore French cuffs. You had to lean in to catch the scent of his cologne which smelled subtly of pine.

The city duplex and the country estate were sublets. No one knew what he was worth. But he had a live-in European pair to run them and that beat everyone in status.

"…quite beautiful in its way," Halko said, "flight in reverse. An elegant retort to gravity. The aftermath is less so, of course." He ordered another round, smiling.

There was a horrible fascination to such a conversation. Who speaks that way? Fuck, the men ended up splattered like cat puke on the city sidewalks. Three days' running. East side, west side, all around the town. There were hysterical wives and hollow-eyed children whose comforting had somehow to be fit into the calendar of the season.

And here was Halko, making it sound like a French art-house movie.

They mocked him, in private, as an arriviste, but in the tones of men whistling past the graveyard.