I sat on the couch beside her. I tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away.
“No,” she said. “You don’t get to comfort me. And I don’t get to comfort you. You have two questions. Ask them.”
I was struck with the terrible fear that she’d had sex with Michael Joyce in our house, in our bed.
“Where did it happen?” I asked.
“The first time was in a hotel,” she said. “The Westin downtown. A suite. Early. Eight in the morning. I got the kids off to school, opened up the shop. Jody ran the register and Rick made the coffee and Christy waited tables. I told them I had a dentist appointment.”
“You told me you had a dentist appointment,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I lied to you directly. I never wanted to do that. I knew I was lying to you indirectly, but I hated to look you in the eyes and lie to you. I hated it.”
“The Westin is a decent hotel,” I said. Jesus, I sounded like a travel agent.
“The second time was in his car. We parked down on Lake Washington. You were down in Tacoma, covering the football championships.”
“I called home that night,” I said. “Sara was watching the kids. She said you had an emergency at the shop. The espresso maker was overheating.”
“She didn’t know I was lying. She thought I was at the shop.”
Once or twice a month, I ran the path alongside Lake Washington. I knew I would never run it again. How can I survive this? I thought. How many more of my routines will I have to change? Again I tried to take my wife’s hand. This time she let me. We interlaced our fingers. A small moment of intimacy, but enough to keep me from running out of the room and house and fleeing down the street.
“The third time was in his apartment,” she said. “In his bed. Lunchtime. I fell asleep with him. I hated that. That’s why I ended it. Falling asleep with him felt like the worst thing I could do. I never felt evil until I fell asleep with him.”
She leaned over and kissed my forehead. I felt her heat. I didn’t want to feel her heat. I didn’t want to smell her scent. I didn’t want to taste her. And it felt like time squared and cubed and then exploded exponentially. Days and months and years passed before I would find enough stupid courage to ask my third question.
“What did you do with him?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, into which parts of you did he put it?”
She flinched so painfully that I might as well have punched her in her chest. I was briefly happy about that.
“Do you really want to know that?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She stood and walked away from me. I assume she was afraid I might really punch her.
“We,” she said. “He — I mean, we — did everything.”
“Say it exactly.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You have to. It’s part of the deal.”
“I can’t. It hurts too much.”
“You don’t get to feel as much pain as me. Now say it. Tell me exactly.”
She closed her eyes and moaned like some tortured animal, like she was the first animal feeling the first pain. I heard that sound again when she buried her mother and, thirteen months later, her father.
“Tell me,” I said. “Exactly.”
She couldn’t speak. Instead, she pointed at her mouth, her vagina, and her ass. She looked like a pornographic mime. I started laughing. I lay down on the couch and laughed. I couldn’t stop laughing. She stared at me like I was crazy. Then she started laughing with me. Softly at first, but soon she had to sit down laughing on the floor so she wouldn’t fall down laughing on the floor. She crawled across the floor and climbed onto the couch with me. We held each other and laughed. Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. We held each other in the silence.
“If you still love me,” she said, “please, please, build me a time machine.”
She sounded like a little girl talking to her father. I didn’t know what to say. But we lay there together for hours until the kids came home from school and surprised us.
“Mommy and Daddy were doing it!” the four of them chanted and danced around the living room. “Mommy and Daddy were doing it!”
Sharon and I danced with our children. We danced the family dance, three quick spins, two hops, and a scream at the ceiling, and then Sharon and I made dinner, and we ate with our kids and gossiped about their school days and played Chutes and Ladders and watched The Lion King and made them brush their teeth and wash their faces and forced them into their pajamas and pushed them down the hallways into their beds and read them Curious George and Go, Dog, Go! and turned off the lights and told them good night and gave them our love, and we sat in the kitchen across from each other and drank coffee and added up our wins and our losses and decided to stay married.
It was Emily Dickinson who wrote, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” So Sharon and I formally rebuilt our marriage. And it was blue-collar work, exhausting and painful. We didn’t argue more often than before, but we did live with longer and greater silences. There were times when both of us wanted to quit, but we always found the strength to get up in the morning and go back to the job. And then, one winter night two years after her confession, after eating a lovely dinner at a waterfront restaurant and slow-dancing in the parking lot while a small group of tourists cheered for us, she read a book in bed while I stood at our bedroom window and stared out into the dark. We were comfortable in the silence. A day or week or month or year before, I would have felt the need to end such a wonderful evening by making love to her, by proving I could share our bed and her body with ghosts. But I felt no such need that night, and I realized we’d completed the rebuilding project, we’d constructed a brand-new marriage, a new home, that sat next to the old marriage and its dusty and shuttered house. Standing at the window, I could almost see our old house out there in the dark, and I missed it. I often thought of it as we continued with our lives.
Suddenly, Sharon and I were forty. For my birthday that year, she and the kids all pitched in together and gave me a T-shirt that read LOST CAT on the front and DO YOU KNOW WHERE I AM? on the back.
I laughed and wore that shirt as pajamas. For two years, Sharon fell asleep next to me wearing that shirt.
“Oh, Lord,” I said to Sharon on the day I finally tossed the ragged T-shirt into the trash. “With every new day comes a new monument to our love and pain.”
“Who wrote that?” she asked.
“I did.”
“It’s free verse,” she said. “I hate free verse.”
We laughed and kissed and made love and read books in bed. We read through years of books, decades of books. There were never enough books for us. Read, partially read, and unread, our books filled the house, stacked on shelves and counters, piled into corners and closets. Our marriage became an eccentric and disorganized library. Whitman in the pantry! The Brontë sisters in the television room! Hardy on the front porch! Dickinson in the laundry room! We kept a battered copy of Native Son in the downstairs bathroom so our guests would have something valuable to read!
How do you measure a marriage? Three of our children still lived in Seattle and taught high school English, history, and Spanish respectively, while the fourth managed a homeless shelter in Portland, Oregon. Maybe Sharon and I had never loved each other well enough, but our kids were smart and talented and sober. They made less money than we did, as we made less than our parents did. We were going the wrong way on the social-class map! How glorious!
Every Sunday night, we all gathered for dinner (Joshua drove up from Portland with his partner, Aaron, and their son) and told one another the best stories of our weeks. We needed those small ceremonies. Our contentment was always running only slightly ahead of our dissatisfaction.