He’d seen Lisa’s breasts before. In their first apartment in Brookline, before she and Kenny were married, they hung over the fireplace, inescapable. Disembodied, in gauzy black and white, they were supposed to be art. Kenny had shot them as part of his master’s thesis using a box with a pinhole, the long exposure giving them a ghostly quality.
Emily admired Kenny’s effort. It was the public display she questioned. “She’s obviously trying to shock people. Exactly who, I’m not sure. I’m sorry, but I’m not shocked. We all have them. It’s not a secret.”
Henry thought she had no reason to be jealous, but agreed. His ideal of womanly beauty included modesty. He preferred busty, wholesome girls like the pinups that helped them win the war, their ripeness all coy promise. Lisa was a tomboy, slim-hipped, with the toned arms of a long-distance runner. The picture wasn’t supposed to be sexy, just a life study, a blurry one at that. What struck Henry was how narrow-chested she was, slight as a bird.
After Ella and Sam were born, the picture moved to Kenny and Lisa’s bedroom, where Henry glimpsed it in passing, though over the years, as their visits to New England dwindled, his recollection of it dimmed. Most likely he wouldn’t have thought of it again if he hadn’t been coming through the back hall just as Sam barreled past with a squirt gun and shouldered open the bathroom door to reveal Lisa sitting on the john.
They’d been swimming, and her one-piece was bunched around her knees. She hunched and covered herself, yelling at Sam to get out and shut the door, which he did, too late to erase the vision of her tanned arms and lard-white front from Henry’s mind, and the shocking pink of her nipples, so much bigger than in the picture—so much more present—that he couldn’t reconcile the two. Her breasts were larger as well, full and womanly, belonging to someone else entirely.
His first instinct was to pretend he’d seen nothing.
“Sorry,” he called, retreating, like Sam, before the closed door, and would have been happy to forget it ever happened, an idea he realized was wishful.
By cocktails it had become a story, Lisa mimicking the shock on his face, making them all laugh. It wasn’t true—his eyes didn’t pop like some cartoon character, his mouth didn’t drop open—but he didn’t mind being the butt of the joke. A husband, he had practice.
Now that the secret was out, he felt free to tell Emily the truth. Later, as they were reading in bed, he brought up the picture, wondering if at some point Lisa had had a boob job.
“That’s what happens when you have kids,” Emily said, as if he were being dim. “Or don’t you remember?”
The comparison embarrassed him, and honestly he didn’t. She had always seemed lush to him. Nearly fifty years, yet in his arms she seemed the same girl he’d courted, kissing her good night on the porch of her sorority, the house mother lurking behind the door, enforcing curfew. After Sloan, he coveted her innocence as much as her flesh. In many ways he still did. “I remember.”
The joke played for a few days, along with his reminder to lock the door, which the children latched on to as a tagline, shouting it out in chorus. What troubled him more was the fact that he couldn’t stop seeing Lisa in that split second before she could cover herself, her damp suit a hammock between her knees, her tan lines and the surprising pink. Again and again the vision returned, unbidden, as if he were purposely rewinding it for his own gratification. Not so, he protested. He thought she actually looked better in Kenny’s shot, the unblemished symmetry classical, but now, against his will, whenever he saw her—on the glider or at the dinner table, watching a movie or leaning over the puzzle with the light behind her—he pictured her new breasts inside her shirt and scourged himself like someone caught in a lie.