Sometimes she talks to the husband in her head. You think I don’t know. I know. Once I was sleeping next to that boy and a mouse ran through my hair, but I didn’t move. I didn’t want to risk him getting out of bed.
The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)
I was hoping your happiest memory might include me.
Later the wife realizes what that was, why he placed that special emphasis on each word of the sentence.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the prosecution rests.
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs.
“You’ve made me into a cartoon wife,” she tells him. “I am not a cartoon wife.”
The Buddha named his son Rahula, which means “fetter.”
The Buddha left his wife when his son was two days old. He would never have attained enlightenment if he’d stayed, scholars say.
As for us, our days are like grass.
“We don’t know, but the cards know,” her daughter says when they are playing a game later.
Are you going to leave him? Is he going to leave you? Do you think you’ll make it?
It is her married friends that ask these questions. The single ones don’t. They think it’s simpler. Sometimes the wife cries. Sometimes she shrugs.
The cards know.
35
The wife has never not wanted to be married to him. This sounds false but it is true.
She has wanted to sleep with other people, of course. One or two in particular. But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn’t dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.
Do you have a secret life? This is what she asks all her friends. Hardly any of the other writers do. But a few people avert their eyes before answering. No, they say. Either that or they tell her everything.
She has never had a secret life. But after all of this, she does a little. But the secret part seems too small to tell anyone who might be a true secret lifer.
Like how two guys are sending her music, how she is taking yoga, how she has borrowed $400 from the philosopher that she keeps hidden in an envelope in the closet, how she has received but not cashed her royalties check.
“Sometimes I think of revenge,” she tells him. He winces. “What would that look like?”
In Africa, they tied the couple together and threw them into a river of crocodiles.
In ancient Greece, the punishment was a root vegetable inserted into the anus.
In France, the woman was made to chase a chicken through the streets naked.
Door #3?
How did you meet? Go back to the beginning.
This is what the worksheet in the adultery book says.
It will be a long time before one of the Voyagers will encounter another star. And even then it won’t come very close. There is a red dwarf star called Ross 248. In 40,000 years, Voyager 2 will come within 1.7 light-years of it, still far enough away that it will seem like no more than a dot of light. Astronomers say that if you looked at it through the porthole of Voyager 2, it would seem to slowly brighten over the millennia, then slowly dim for many more.
There is one thing the wife tells the philosopher which she isn’t sure anyone else will understand. If she tells it to someone else, they might think she is being self-deprecating. But she isn’t being self-deprecating. She is being religious. The thing is this: Even if the husband leaves her in this awful craven way, she will still have to count it as a miracle, all of those happy years she spent with him. “It was a fucking miracle that I found him,” she tells the philosopher. “A fucking miracle. Past tense.” They are sitting cross-legged on the floor like they used to in their dorm rooms. “I think I was afraid to go all in,” she says.
“Because all in is terrifying. With all in, you lose everything.” He nods and suddenly they are both crying a little.
He calls her up later. “Get him up to the country. You can leave him in six months if you want, but get him out of here.”
The adultery book says it’s unwise to make any big moves in the aftermath of such an event. There is, unfortunately, no geographical cure.
Bullshit, her sister says.
She goes to visit her and writes the husband a letter from London. She isn’t sure if she should use the old return address, but then at the last minute she pencils it in. She is after all, speculating.
Dear Husband,
Forget the city. There is nothing for us anymore. The birds are leaving even. I saw two pigeons on the runway when my plane took off yesterday.
She’ll leave the city to her students, the ones whose shoes are held together by electrical tape, the ones who tear up at the sight of discarded umbrellas, the ones who buy the inscrutable Russian candy and the halal goat meat. Just last week, one was outside her office memorizing all the categories of clouds (in case this proved necessary).
“What is the worst thing that ever happened to him?” her sister asks her. And the answer is nothing ever has.
“That’s the problem,” she says. “He’s just a nice boy from Ohio. He has no idea how to fix something like this.”
There is a pause and the wife thinks they are both wondering what it would be like to grow up like that. Their mother died when they were young. Their father was elsewhere. What would it be like to make it so late into life before trouble hit? To always have someone on the front porch, calling you to dinner? The husband doesn’t have even a touch of this raised-by-wolvesness.
But the girl does, she bets. Something in her past that makes her want to tear things to shreds.
Is it possible there is some alternate universe in which the wife and the girl would be friends? She has heard such stories before from her grad students, of the sad-seeming married man, of the unkind wife, of the “all I did was send him music” variety.
She imagines having lunch with her and hearing the story of this married guy she thinks she’s in love with. Should she get him drunk and say something? She is almost positive he feels the same. The way he looks at her, the way they walk back together from lunch, their hands almost touching.
What Ann Druyan said: Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman newly in love sound like a string of firecrackers exploding.
Recent Posts
Why do we age?
Where is the best place to live?
Which rules are right?
Do aliens exist?
There are many ways in which she has been a good wife, some that would hold up under cross-examination even. But when she thinks of listing them, she keeps hearing the voice of a TV lawyer in her head.