But when Blanton trundled across the threshold, Roger felt a surge of disappointment, and more than disappointment, revulsion. The other man was older than Roger had anticipated. His hairline was receding, his face was not just slackjawed but jowly. His polo shirt — once green, evidently — was faded beyond the point at which Roger would have cast it aside. His weighty paunch sagged across the waistband of rumpled khaki shorts, whose fabric squeezed flabby haunches.
Roger’s revulsion deepened. What sense of victory could he achieve when there wasn’t really a challenge in sight?
Along the curving driveway, then glimpsing the house — modem and angular — and then walking up the steps, Blanton had been struck by the feeling that he was somehow spying on his wife, spying in plain sight. Rethinking possibilities, weighing consequences, he became so lost in his thoughts that he seemed to be watching himself too — all of this, his own finger on the doorbell, the door opening in response — as if from some great distance, some other man making these small moves, unsure where it would end.
Roger Wilson, he heard the other man say, as if through a tube, tinnily echoed, and then his own voice, Blanton Morrison, and his own hand as if another’s reaching out to shake the hand of Felicia’s lover — a man who seemed to have stepped directly from the pages of some fashion catalog. Felicia handed over a bottle of wine they’d picked up on the way. Blanton offered a pair of mangoes and felt himself patting the breast pocket of his coat. Somewhere the words mint and drinks and later — his own — and then Roger’s thanks, thanks, thanks and hope the directions were okay and Felicia’s reply, No trouble getting here. Necessary pretenses. Ruses. He knew she’d been here before.
And then another woman coming down the hallway — thick red hair, a wide smile, wiping her hands on a dishtowel — and Blanton felt relief and sudden elation. Maybe he’d been wrong?
“My, what a beautiful sight,” he exclaimed, too loudly — the volume suddenly back on but turned up too high — and he felt embarrassed at his outburst. But when she giggled and opened her arms — “I adore a man who flatters first thing. That deserves a hug instead of a handshake!” — he welcomed the sense of being embraced and all that this woman seemed to mean: This evening wasn’t the beginning of some horrible series of events, but a dinner to mark some end.
“Felicia didn’t tell me you had such a lovely girlfriend,” he said, almost on the verge of giddiness. But then he noticed the sudden hush.
“Jessica’s not my girlfriend,” Roger said.
“I know him too well,” Jessica laughed, nervously, blushing. “I’m not his style.”
There was some brief interplay of glances between the three of them, Blanton saw. Nothing was safe. None of them.
“A local artist,” Roger was explaining, pointing to the headless torso of a woman on a side table: bronze, nearly all breasts and the back arched to emphasize it. “Molded from her own body.”
“I’ve never liked that piece,” said Jessica.
Felicia had never liked the sculpture either, always felt that Roger thought of all women the way the artist had presented herself: all breasts, no head. But she didn’t say that now. Blanton hadn’t responded either, and Felicia wondered at his quietness. A dull panic? A simple sulk?
The image prompted a memory — a college boyfriend, a sulker himself. He’d loved David Lynch movies, she remembered as Roger continued his tour of the house, Blanton commenting on the light, Jessica throwing Felicia little glances, trying to catch her attention. Felicia couldn’t remember the boy’s name now, only his goatee and his baggy shirts and the two of them watching Lost Highway in his dorm room, all the lights out and her attention wandering.
Another night, they’d gone for pizza (Paul? Peter? Philip? P certainly) — late night, a local hangout, a crush of people, frat boys at a table nearby, and the two of them in a booth of their own. The pizza arrived, and she and P. had each taken a slice, and as they ate, one of the frat boys had turned and started talking to her: “How are you doing? You’re looking good tonight. That pizza smells great.” And then he’d turned to P. and said, “You don’t mind if I have a piece, do you?” and he’d picked up a slice of their pizza and eaten it in front of them, a smile and a wink at Felicia between bites.
“Yeah,” P. had said, hesitantly, and “Um” and “We’re kind of talking here.”
Later, P. had fretted and moaned — all the things he should’ve said, the things he should’ve done. “I could’ve punched him. I could’ve stabbed his hand with my fork, I could’ve...” Revenge fantasies, underscored by hints that maybe Felicia herself should’ve acted differently too.
Felicia had slept with the frat boy months later, long after P. was gone from her life. She didn’t remember his name now either, and wasn’t sure he’d remembered hers even at the time. That hadn’t seemed the point, and now she couldn’t quite remember what the point had been.
Standing at the grill with Blanton, Roger found himself just going through the motions of what he’d planned.
When Blanton said he liked his steaks well done, Roger said he preferred “a little more pink in the middle, the way a real man should.”
When Blanton asked how things were at the office, Roger volunteered that Felicia was “a real fireball. Get her going and she just won’t stop.”
“I’m surprised a man like you isn’t married,” Blanton said at one point, as Roger checked the steaks. “Jessica seems swell, doesn’t she?”
“Can’t say I’m the marrying type,” said Roger, not bothering to ridicule the man’s swell. “Not really an institution I put much faith in. But there’s usually someone at work who’s willing to take a little lunch break, if you know what I mean. The usual ins and outs of office romance.” He glanced openly toward the women on the other side of the patio — at Felicia, slender and shapely. “Truth is, I’m involved with a juicy little something myself right now,” he winked.
“That kind of romancing is a younger man’s game,” Blanton said. “I just don’t know what I’d do without my Felicia.”
His Felicia — and yet what had he done to keep her?
Jessica was telling a story across the patio, gesturing with her free hand, leaning toward Felicia, laughing a little. Felicia smiled, demurely, and took a sip of wine. Even from that distance, Roger could see the way her mouth left a smudge on the rim of the glass, the red outline of her lips. Despite the smoke from the grill, he could still remember — as if smelling it now — the vanilla and honeysuckle of her perfume, the scent that sometimes lingered on the pillows on the afternoons she stopped over.
Sometimes Roger had questioned why she talked so rarely about her home life. Unlike the other married women he’d had, she never went into tirades about a dull home life or demanding children, never recited ad nauseam bickering arguments about monies spent and monies earned or dull squabbles about whose turn it had been to take out the trash. Not once had Felicia embarked on some small drama insisting that they must stop this, they must, because she couldn’t do this to her husband, couldn’t do this anymore. At one point, he’d admired the way she handled the affair, but now, seeing Blanton, he felt that admiration turn to pity, a sour pity, and a cruelty too. He’d enjoyed the challenge she offered — all that he saw of himself in her, that strength, that will — and the power play between them. “Three lunches a week, no more,” she’d told him, wanting that control over the relationship, but then asking another time to be tied up, wanting to be dominated in ways she obviously wasn’t getting at home. Now he saw that it must be weakness that held her to Blanton, and he didn’t want to just dominate her but punish her for it.