All during those years, at every house party, group dinner, family gathering, and company picnic, Sharon told the story of the lost cat.
“My husband, the liar,” she always called me. At first, she told the story to hurt me, then she told it out of habit, and then she told it because she’d turned it into a wildly funny and exaggerated adventure: And then he fell in the creek! She loved to make people laugh, and so they laughed at my small sins. I wanted the laughter to absolve me, but I’m not sure if that was its purpose. I never asked to be forgiven, and Sharon never offered her forgiveness. We never talked about the lost cat in private; it was our most public secret.
But there were other secrets, of course. Sharon kept most of hers, and I kept most of mine. Those kept secrets were small and ordinary, having to do with broken diets and hidden pornography, and they were of little consequence, but one evening, a decade into our marriage, Sharon confessed to an extramarital affair.
“I don’t love him,” she said. “It’s over now. I only slept with him three times. To be fair, you can ask me three questions about it, and I’ll answer them as honestly as possible, and then I don’t ever want to talk about it again.”
I was hurt by the frankness of her words, by her deal-making, but she cried, and her voice trembled as she spoke, and she’d never been one to feign emotion or cry for dramatic purposes, so I was lost in her contradictions.
“How could you do that to me?” I asked.
“Is that a real question?” she asked. “Or is it rhetorical?”
I panicked. I didn’t want to waste my three questions. I wanted to know details, the facts and figures, and not emotional states. But which particular details did I want to know? And which questions would elicit the most information? I needed to be a brutally efficient interrogator. I couldn’t believe I was participating in this horrible transaction.
“Listen,” I said, “this is ridiculous. Let’s talk this out like normal people.”
“That’s the problem,” she said. “Everything is so normal. You didn’t used to be normal. I didn’t marry normal.”
She was a thirty-two-year-old woman with four young kids, and she owned and managed a small business. So she was one of those notorious superwomen. I knew she was always exhausted, but what could I do to help her? I could never tell her she worked too hard, and I certainly couldn’t tell her she should spend more time with the kids. I couldn’t ask her to choose between her work life and her home life. As a man, I would never be asked to make a similar choice. I spent most Friday and Saturday nights watching other people’s children play football, basketball, and volleyball. What kind of father was I? I could best be described as cordially absent on weekends and lovingly distracted on weekdays. What kind of husband was I? Apparently, I was the kind of husband whose wife needed to sleep with at least one other man and an untold number of others who might be waiting in line. There are millions of those clueless husbands, aren’t there? Wasn’t I yet another cuckolded husband, slightly distinguished by knowing how to self-define with an Old English word? I was eight hundred years old. I was historic, predictable, and planned. I was normal.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“His name is Michael Joyce,” she said. “He’s a regular at the shop. I’ve asked him to never come back. He agreed. He’s a good man.”
I was surprised to discover I wanted to hit my wife. I wanted to punch her in the stomach and make her fall to the floor. I wanted to see her gasping with physical pain. I would never hurt her that way — I hadn’t struck another human being since the third grade — but the violent impulse was there, and I was frightened and exhilarated by it. My wife had no idea how dangerous I could be. I felt better knowing I could hurt her far more than she’d hurt me. And then I was revolted. How could I love a person and want to hurt her so much? How could I look at my wife, the mother of my children, and feel only the need for revenge? I paced around the room, ran my fingers roughly through my hair, because I needed to move. I needed to find another space in which to exist. I studied the details of the living room: the antique lamps purchased for full price and the end tables rescued from garage sales and refurbished; the brown leather couch and black leather recliner; the Monet and Kahlo prints on the walls; the bookshelves stuffed with novels and sports histories; and the coffee tables adorned with art books. All of it was tasteful and beautiful and appropriate and hard-earned and useless.
Sharon wore a red blouse and blue jeans. Her feet were bare and needed a pedicure. Once a month, her feet were scrubbed clean and polished by a Vietnamese woman whose name and exact place of business I would never know. Sharon wore a fake pearl necklace her mother had given her for some birthday, and real pearl earrings I’d given her on our fifth anniversary. The fake pearls were prettier than the real ones. I don’t know why I noticed her physical details, but it seemed important to take note of all I could. I felt the insistent need to be exact. Since it was laundry day, I knew she’d be wearing her oldest brassiere, and would never initiate lovemaking while wearing it, but would gladly receive my advances after first dashing into the bathroom to quickly remove the tattered bra. How many times had she emerged topless from the bathroom and run laughing toward me? Who keeps accurate count of such wonderful moments? Wouldn’t a better husband know that number by heart?
“I’m a bad husband,” I said. Why was I apologizing?
She turned away and sat on the couch as far away from me as possible. I kept pacing around the room.
“He’s white,” she said, volunteering the information, and I was strangely relieved. My emotions were changing and shifting randomly. If I’d been an actor in a musical, I would have broken into song for no apparent reason. I would have tap-danced to the primal 4/4 beat of betrayal. I would have leaped over the couch where she was sitting and rewon her heart with my grace and strength. What a dream life I have, and how instantly I can immerse myself in it! Can you believe I was happy to hear she’d slept with only a white man? I would have been tortured to hear she’d slept with another Indian man. Considering her beauty, ambition, and intelligence, I could conceive of an amazing white man or black man who might love her and be loved in return, but I doubted another Indian man of my particular talents existed out there in the world. Call it a potent mix of arrogance and self-hatred, but I was certain I was the one Indian man who was good enough for my Indian wife.
I believed I was being rational, but who can be rational in such a painful situation? Wouldn’t my wife and I hold entirely different standards for what made a man good or great? What if she’d slept with a plumber or a construction worker? What if she’d slept with a supermarket graveyard-shift worker or a high school dropout? I couldn’t stand the thought of my wife sleeping with a blue-collar man who’d read fewer books than I had. I wanted to believe my wife slept with another man because she needed to be loved in a new way, a more educated and intellectual way, and not because she wanted to hurt me. I didn’t understand what I was feeling, and I didn’t know what to do, and I couldn’t ask her to help me, because that might qualify as my second question and would leave me with only one.
“Don’t look at me that way,” she said.
“What way?” I asked.
“Like this is inconceivable. Like I’m the Loch Ness Monster.”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking, feeling, or seeing.”
“That’s the problem. You’ve been blind for years.”