This story was first published in Reed Magazine, Vol. 48, Spring 1994.
He begins referring to it as “when our problems began” or, alternately, as “when we started having trouble.” It is as though by using the passive voice he can blame their problems on something that has been visited upon them by Fate, instead of as the result of something that his wife has done.
He spends many of their sessions with the marriage counselor dissecting “how they got to this point,” as though a snail had slithered across their lives, leaving a poisonous silver trail of lies and resentments that lead irrevocably to where things are now. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thinks that if he can pinpoint where the trail started, the troubles will end.
So, under the therapist’s owl like gaze, he carefully defends his position, examines his wife’s demands and moodiness and points to budgets ignored and too many hours spent at work. His wife fidgets during these sessions. She knows what they are not discussing.
Sometimes, in spite of himself, he remembers the day that he came home from work to find his wife in bed, eyes swollen shut from crying, the skin around her nostrils red and raw. He hung his shirt on a wire coat hanger and placed it on the doorknob so that he would not forget to take it to the cleaners’ the next day. When he turned she was sitting up, eyes brimming with a strange new meaning. He sat down next to his wife and asked her if she was OK and she said “No, I’m not,” and then she told him what she had done and that was when their troubles really began, although he would prefer to forget that.
Later, when the shock had worn off and he had begun sleeping again, he tried to reclaim her body. Their blood and skin understood that this was necessary to blot out the memory of the other man. But he sensed her recalcitrant heart hanging on to the past like a cat biting into an arm, and neither of them felt any pleasure.
There have been other changes. She no longer talks about summer parties and barbecues and planting a garden in a new home in a nice neighborhood. She no longer writes down the numbers on “For Sale” signs. She has stopped suggesting they go out to dinner, which is just as well, because when they do, she often gazes over his shoulder, past him. He wonders who she is looking for, and then he tries to think about something else.
In fact, she has begun asking him whether he wouldn’t like to move to another state and start over. We could have a nice home in Texas, she has pointed out. Sometimes she asks whether he wouldn’t like to start over without her. One night, he chuckles at this and tells her, a bit sharply, to stop it. She looks up from the kitchen counter where she is tearing up lettuce. She is tearing up much more than is needed for the two of them. She keeps tearing and he is afraid of what will happen when she stops. It is at this point that he brings up, for the first time, the subject of a new home, here, in this state, in this city.
“But why?” she says. “Why would we want to live here?”
Later he finds her sitting on the floor of their bedroom with old calendars spread out in front of her. Her hair falls like a shroud, obscuring her face.
“I just want to remember when things happened,” she says, without looking up. What things? he thinks, but does not ask.
Instead he feels once again the dread seeping in his heart. He had thought that the dark nights, with their tears and pills and her talk of a world that would be better off without her, had stopped, and that things might get back to how they had been before.
When they lie next to each other in bed that night, he feels a crispness in the bedroom, a chill. He knows a storm is about to start. He rolls onto his side and prays that she will fall asleep. Please God, he prays, please make her be OK.
After a while she gets quietly out of bed and creeps into the kitchen. He lies still, wondering whether he should follow. He doesn’t really want to.
He finds her with her head on her arms, sobbing. As he leads her back to bed, she apologizes over and over and he holds her and strokes her hair until the tears stop and she falls asleep.
He wakes up again in the middle of the night and slides his hand through the sheets to her body. He puts his hand on her hip and is surprised to feel something smooth and sharp under his fingers. He realizes that it is her hipbone, and he is startled to feel how much weight she has lost, the skin smooth and concave and falling away from the bone down the now slight curve of her stomach like a sand dune, like the curl of a wave. He wonders if the other man felt this hipbone. When did it all happen? The question he would not ask her–Is it over?–his mind asks him, a question he does not want answered.
She rolls on to her back to look at him, her face blue in the moonlight that seeps through the Venetian blinds.
“Don’t leave me,” he says to her.
He sees tears form in her eyes, trace down her cheeks. Is he dreaming?
“Oh,” she says. “I won’t. I promise.”
A few days later, he convinces her to go house hunting. He regards it as somewhat of victory.
As he sits in the front seat of the real estate agent’s car, content, hopeful, he begins to relax. The agent is a petite, chipper woman in her late 40s, with perfect make-up and coiffed, short dark hair and a girlish, sweet voice. The big car she drives doesn’t suit her, and he imagines making fun of it with his wife later. They’ll have a good laugh over the overstuffed velour upholstery, the oak veneer dashboard.
To this other woman, his wife shows a different person. She asks the agent polite questions about houses and inspections and escrow and even about schools, which he interprets as a good sign, though he does not particularly want children. They have been through many houses so far today, and he has been surprised at her patience. You’d almost think she was excited about it, he thinks. He turns around and gives her what he assumes is a reassuring smile, as if to thank her for being a good sport.
“There’s one more house I just have to show you,” says the real estate agent, turning off Alma into a Palo Alto neighborhood of small, expensive homes.
He hears his wife shift her weight in the back seat, and he is surprised at the urgency in her voice.
“I don’t like the neighborhood,” she says.
“Why not?” he asks.
“I don’t think we can afford it.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” says the agent. “The prices have really come down a lot. You two really should see this one. I should have shown it to you earlier. But I wanted to see your reaction to some of the other places. I’m sure that this is what you two have had in mind. I can just visualize you in it.”
“It’s been a long day,” his wife says in the nice voice she uses when she’s trying to be assertive. “Maybe next week.”
“One more won’t kill you,” he says.
She looks from him to the agent and then sits back and stares out the window. Oh no, he thinks. The car stops in front of a small, New England style house with grey walls and white trim and a door painted scarlet red. It reminds him of the type of home that she used to point out to him in catalogs.
“Fine,” she says, staring at the house. “Let’s take a look.” There is enough cheerfulness in her voice that he knows she doesn’t mean it. She gets out of the car and walks quickly up the front walk to the porch. She fixes her eyes on the ground as the real estate agent unlocks it.
They walk through the empty house as they would walk through a cathedral. His wife stays close to the agent while he wanders around on his own. As he walks through the living room she comes into view, framed by the kitchen doorway; his eye catches her like the camera in a silent movie. The living room is bright with late afternoon sun, and the sounds of his footsteps echo in it and bounce off the white, newly painted walls. He watches his wife, her calm face, her dark thoughts. Dust motes hang between them like tiny galaxies. He wants this house, he wants her in it, he wants her to be happy and to come back to life.
He looks out the picture window. This could be a starting over, he thinks. Maybe he can even forget and forgive and move on, just as he had told her he had already done.
He watches a car turn into the driveway of the house across the street.
“Hey, guess what?” he calls to his wife when he sees the man getting out of the car. “Jack Harwood just pulled up to the house across the street. Do you know if he lives there?”
“No,” she answers from the other room after a pause.
“I thought you said you’d been to his house.” He heads to the front door. “He must be doing pretty well to live in this neighborhood.”
She comes into the doorway of the living room and from there she peers out the window.
“He always gets everything he wants,” she says.
“Do you every talk to him anymore since he got his new job?”
“No.” She looks straight into his eyes. She puts a hand on the doorjamb. “He’s a big important person now. He doesn’t need me.”
“What do you think about this house? Do you like it?”
“Not really.”
Again, he feels the disappointment. “Well, do you want to go?”
“In a minute.” She doesn’t move. “I want to look around a little more.”
In her voice he hears a warning, a distant rumble that he cannot decipher and so ignores. “I think I’ll go say hello to Jack,” he says.
“Why?”
“I’ve seen the rest of the house. I’ll just be a second.”
He walks down the steps, pads across the lawn and into the street. He greets, shakes hands with Jack, a tall, well-built man about his height, but bigger than him, stronger.
“I didn’t know you lived around here,” he says.
“Yeah, it’s a nice neighborhood.” Jack takes his glasses off and rubs the bridge of his nose with one hand, squeezing his eyes shut as if they hurt him.
“Are you feeling OK?”
“Oh yeah. Just a few too many beers last night.”
“We’re looking at the house. If we bought it we’d be neighbors.”
“Yeah, I guess we would.”
He looks at Jack and their eyes meet, and suddenly, he knows everything. It is inconceivable.
He doesn’t even have to look to know that his wife is standing on the porch. He turns to face her and feels that he is turning in slow motion, like that day, the day their troubles had started. His face had gone numb, just as it is now.
When he sees his wife’s face, he knows that she has kept the promise she made when she refused to reveal the other’s name. She has kept the promise never to see the other again, though, as she assured him, he didn’t have to worry. “I was a conquest,” she said, “that’s all I was.”
Her expression reminds him, suddenly, of a nature show they had watched on television on New Years’ Day, while recovering from particularly vicious hangovers. A nature show about lions. About what they do to female lions who bear the cubs of lions outside the pride. They banish them, is what they do, and the lionesses are left to roam the veldt with their cubs, unless the pride of the other lion, the father, the lover, takes them in. “That’s terrible,” he had said to her.
“Life is unfair,” she answered, her tone distracted. “You can’t trust anyone.”
He doesn’t know why he should think of a nature show. It is inconceivable, too. Inconceivable. A word that he would never use in conversation. But that is the word he thinks of, over and over, as he remembers the lions, as his wife continues to stare at the man next to him. The look on her face speaks of unrecoverable loss, of a thousand betrayals. He understands it all.
He turns to his wife’s lover. He is not sure what he will do. Then he hears her voice, clear above the ringing in his ears.
“We’ll take it,” she says to the real estate agent standing behind her, and something dark begins to whisper inside him.
