“THREE MARTINI LUNCH - EPILOGUE” (SHORT STORY)

Anne Sexton steers wild, cigarette dangling, while Sylvia Plath fixes her lipstick.

They are young and brilliant and haunted. They laugh too loud and share too little. The real things stay buried deep.

“Three Martini Lunch - Epilogue” is a literary short story about where the real things are.

What secrets do these women poets keep beneath their suburban smiles?

What draws them to their fates?

1,000 words / 12 minutes of lyrical reading pleasure

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‘Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs - no regular hours, so many temptations.’ Elizabeth Bishop

STEFANO BOSCUTTI

THREE MARTINI LUNCH - EPILOGUE

Copyright 2024 Stefano Boscutti
All Rights Reserved

It’s spring, 1959.

ANNE SEXTON, 30, is grinning a lopsided grin, Salem menthol cigarette dangling from her lips, right arm draped over the back of the front seat of her sky blue Ford Saloon, reversing helter-skelter out of the narrow loading zone beside the Ritz hotel in downtown Boston.

SYLVIA PLATH, 26, is in the passenger seat, giggling and trying to apply a fresh coat of her favourite lipstick. Smirking at her reflection in her compact mirror. Both are dead drunk in the pale afternoon after consuming nothing but extra dry martinis and free potato chips for lunch in the hotel bar.

The car sweeps back into Arlington Street, brakes hard enough to whiplash and then rocks and shudders forward as it weaves its way towards a creative writing seminar at Boston University led by Robert Lowell. Sexton and Plath had become fast friends during a poetry workshop. Sexton all sass and whirlwind bluster. Plath pinned down and serious.

Lunch with all those martinis was the first time the poets had caught up at the Ritz before a seminar. Usually they’d head off for martinis at the hotel bar with another poet George Starbuck after each seminar.

The pair gossiped and laughed and shrieked as they got more and more loaded, more and more loose. Secrets and lies, truths and misgivings spilled out everywhere as they stirred each other on.

Sexton had been delving deeper and deeper into her life for her work, for her writing, for her poems. Her psychiatrist had encouraged her to get her feelings down on paper, told her poetry would make her well.

Once she started she couldn’t stop. Her intensely autobiographical poems about her mental breakdowns, her erotic fantasies and her preoccupation with death. She wanted to hold nothing back.

A clinically depressed, raven-haired suburban Boston housewife with suicidal tendencies, lean good looks and insatiable thirst for attention. Penning one damn poem after the other. Popping one damn pill after the other.

All the manic energy was an armour against the shame and fear, the unknowing. The woman everyone wanted her to be. The woman she could never be.

Sexton looked and acted like a housewife. But she was by her own admission a lousy cook, a lousy wife, a lousy mother. Too busy grappling with a poem to remember to be a normal American housewife.

Sexton swings the car right into Berkely Street then left into Commonwealth Avenue, drifting across the second lane and laughing as she straightens the steering wheel and accelerates towards Boston University. Plath leans her head back, eyes closed. Her compact mirror slips from her fingers.

So much was left unsaid during lunch. All the real things not shared, the real emotions unexpressed. The honest truths, the rough magic.

How Sexton always drops her books and papers when she rushes into a writing seminar. How she can’t abide the silences. How her hands shake when she reads a poem out loud. How her voice quivers and cracks. How the men pine. How the women spite.

How she never talks about the fascination, the daring, the lost words. How you have to free yourself from form, free yourself from life. How you have to come into your own skin, your own poem.

All the things unsaid. How poetry should shock the senses, should almost hurt. How she cannot build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out. How she cannot break out of her body. How she cannot understand men.

If she understood men, she would understand their need for a perfect lawn. She lives in a square house on an average street in the suburbs, where the lawn is a very important thing.

On the day before her twenty-eighth birthday, alone at home with two young daughters while her husband is away on business, she swallows an overdose of barbiturates. Nembutal - her favourite kill-me pills. She’s placed in a psychiatric hospital.

Plath and Sexton are drawn to each and to death like moths to an electric light bulb. They talk of death almost constantly. Talk of the ways but never the whys.

All the important things unsaid. The husbands sleeping like strangers in their beds at night. The children’s laugh like breaking glass. The cuts across their skin like rivers.

They fly through the traffic like witches possessed.

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Copyright 2024 Stefano Boscutti

All Rights Reserved

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This is a work of fiction. While many of the characters portrayed here have counterparts in the life and times of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and others, the characterisations and incidents presented are totally the products of the author’s slippery imagination. This work is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It should not be resold or given away. Thank you for your support. (Couldn’t do it without you.)

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