I'm currently reading Stephen King's enjoyable and instructive nonfiction work "On Writing." In one chapter, he assigns some "homework," which involves writing a short narrative outline of a story starting with a simple premise: an estranged wife beats-up or murders her husband. Here's my assignment, turned in on time.
Gabriela and Mark met at the Halloween party with the best reputation on campus, which was thrown by the nerdiest frat on campus. She dressed up as a sexy angel. He was Batman. Her remarkable cleavage and well defined hips lead him to pursue her relentlessly after that, and she only relented when she learned of his father’a status as a wealthy movie producer.
They go on a few dates, and he is awkward but charming, and certainly generous. He takes her to the finest restaurants in Los Angeles, gets them backstage passes to pop music concerts, and they go to Hollywood parties. One memorable evening, she gets to meet Robert Pattinson and Anderson Cooper at the same party. All the while she plays along, cautiously avoiding a serious physical relationship while enjoying the rarefied air, despite having little or no feelings for Mark.
Her forced affections must have been too convincing, because after only a few weeks of dating he proposed. The rock he slid onto her finger could have paid off her student loans and them some, so she failed to say no. The wedding was a lavish 500 person affair, Gabriela’s large extended family (many up from Baja California) comprising about a third of the guests. The remaining couple hundred were total strangers, a truly terrifying situation for the timid and shy Gabriela. Mark’s mother planned everything with her favorite event planner, and could have bought Gabriela’s parent’s house twice over with the money she spent.
Gabriela hadn’t had any qualms up-selling her faith and heritage as excuses to avoid sleeping with Mark pre wedlock, but that didn’t fly anymore. While hardly a virgin, she tried to play the role and asked for gentleness. But on the wedding night, Mark was badly drunk and reckless. The only saving grace was that it was a short; each moment was excruciating.
The world tour honeymoon started in Vegas. They enjoyed great seats at a Cirque de Soleil show, threw away unseemly amounts of cash at the craps and blackjack tables, and spent a surprising amount of time betting on fringe sports at the Hilton sportsbook, all the while ingesting copious amounts of overpriced champaign and myriad designer drugs. At night he took his husbandly right and passed out for a few hours. She woke up at 5am when he returned from a second night out, but she pretended to remain asleep. She tried to ignore the stink of sweat and latex, but it was patently obvious that he’d patronized a strip club, or perhaps worse.
The next stop was New York, then Paris and then then the Riviera. And so it went, a different city every few days, but at each stop it was the same. She began medicating herself with more and more booze every evening to get through the inevitable nightly business. Once, maybe it was Rome, she actually got him drunk enough so that he passed out beforehand. That was the happiest night of her marriage.
In South Africa, they met up with a cadre of Mark’s frat brothers, a sycophantic entourage that followed him around for his table scraps. They rented a tremendous yacht and brought aboard a dozen or so young women, presumably prostitutes. Mark had arranged a closet full of skimpy bikinis he made Gabriela wear, presumably to show off his wife’s shapely body to his pals.
One day they decide to try out the yachts fishing equipment. One of the frat brothers has some experience, and they manage to catch a good haul of tuna. There’s some excitement when they see the fin of several great whites circling behind their boat.
That night, Mark tries to get Gabriela to participate in some orgiastic reveling, but she resists. He verbally abuses her and eventually goes off to join the others. He’s clearly gone too far this time, treating her like a pricey whore and expecting her to act like it.
Gabriela marches out while they’re at it and brutally chops up the tuna to get out her rage. When she calms down, she begins freaking out that Mark will notice the missing fish, so she goes and finds a bucket and fills it up with the hacked up fish parts. When she goes to the back of the yacht to dump it out, Mark appears. He’s naked and covered in sweat. He confronts her and her blood boils up again.
They tussle, but he’s drunk and high so she easily bests him, tossing him overboard.
As an extra measure of anger, she tosses the disgusting fish parts over on top of him, laughing derisively. He starts yelling and cursing at her, but she just keeps laughing. He doesn’t connect the dots that the engine is running and approaches the ladder anyways. Gabriela sees this and screams at him to stop, even throwing a life saver towards him. He listens, just in time to avoid being chopped up by the rotor.
That’s when Gabriela see’s the shark fin. In the middle of thanking her and apologizing, Mark is attacked by the shark. By the time she gets the engines turned off, he’s nowhere to be found and the lifesaver is cut loose and drifting away.
When they return to port in Cape Town, the police question everyone on the ship, but there are no witnesses. In the middle of Gabriela’s interview, one of the detectives gets a phone call. After hanging up, he informs her that husband, barely alive alive and washed up on shore about an hour north of the city.
She visits the hospital in stunned silence. The shark has done terrible damage, and he’s only holding on by a thread. She cries at his bedside, half out of fear of being discovered and half out of empathy. He wakes briefly and tries to talk, his heart racing. He manages to utter two haunting words before passing out: “I’m sorry.” After a few hours, he passes into a coma and eventually dies from blood loss.
(Ok, ok, so they aren't estranged. But the point of the assignment was to dig up a story and see where it goes, and the timeline just didn't fit!)
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