JOHN REMEMBERED HOW HUNTER USED TO COME INTO THE office to ask him questions. Hunter never simply poked his head in. Depending on his mood and the nature of the request, he would come skipping or sneaking in, all the way around the desk each time, wrap his tiny arms around John’s shoulders, and nearly whisper in his ear. Can I have a piece of cake? Can we go to the park? What are you doing? Brennan’s bothering me. I love you.
Now, Hunter stopped a few steps into the room, staring at his father, hunched in his chair, head in hands. John sat back carefully and met Hunter’s eyes.
“Were those men reporters?”
John nodded.
“Will they ever leave us alone?”
“I don’t know. Sooner or later.”
“I thought you won the trial. Why are they still following you?”
“It’s not like the movies. Some people will always think that I did it.”
“Why do they think you did it?”
John looked down to his hands. “It’s complicated. It’s a grown-up thing.”
“Did you have an affair?”
“How do you know what that is?”
Hunter shrugged, diffident for the first time since he entered the room. “I’ve been around. It’s New York City.”
John had hoped he would never have to tell Brennan or Hunter directly about cheating. He understood well that they would learn the fact of his infidelity. If they were older, they would already know. As it was, John figured that in a few years they might look back to see what the trial was about or ask a friend or finally piece together scraps of overheard conversations. But he didn’t want to see their faces when they learned.
“I’m not talking about this with you. It’s not a kid thing.”
Hunter stood his ground. “Please. It’s so much worse not knowing why.”
“I don’t know how to explain it, Hunter. People make mistakes. A lot of times, those mistakes hurt other people—even people we love. Sometimes especially people we love.”
“Did you cheat on Mommy?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
John looked out the window. John had spent every day since he left the holiday party with Jessica asking himself that same question. There wasn’t enough breath in him to speak all the words necessary to give a full answer—each bit of context rested on another. Pieces of understanding circled back on each other, crossing over and under, endlessly—a vast, sprawling rainforest of why. How could he capture the scale and complexity of the underlying phenomena—the individual seconds and memories that constituted the whole and made it real? He could no more point to a single event to explain the reason any more than he could point to a single tree and say, That is why the rainforest is here.
Still, Hunter waited for an answer.
#
Jessica waited for him, stripped to her underwear and reading a paperback romance on Cathy’s couch. The cheap pink sheet that Jessica used when they borrowed Cathy’s apartment covered the couch.
“You know, if I were your wife, this is how I’d be waiting for you every night.”
John dropped his briefcase and undressed by the door. “Yeah? No kids?”
“I told you, I don’t see myself as a mother.” She let one foot drop to the floor and raised the other to rest on the back of the couch. She held the book in her left hand. Her right slid down her stomach to her hip.
By the time John removed his socks, Jessica’s hand was rocking inside of her underwear.
“Does your wife do this for you?”
“She used to.”
“Do you like it?”
John nodded. “What about your husband? Doesn’t he like this?”
“He loves it. But I love doing it for you.”
He remained at the door, watching. The other side of the door was the place where the laws of society applied. His children were home in bed. So was Jane, probably, even though it was only ten. His work lay on his desk where he abandoned it before rushing out. On this side of the door, Jessica threw the book to the floor. The hand in her underwear moved faster. Her other hand grabbed impulsively at her breast, then her thigh, back to her neck. Her eyes alternated between rolling up into her head and meeting his.
“If you don’t come here, I’m going to finish without you.”
“Go ahead. I want to watch.”
Her eyes closed, and he wondered how much was performance and how much was authentic. Then she finished, eyes squeezed shut, biting her hand to keep from screaming out, absolutely her truest self. Lightheaded, John walked to the couch, removed her underwear and gently kissed where her hand had been. Jessica shook, enduring the exquisite sensitivity, before lifting his head up to hers to taste herself on his mouth. John kissed her, teasing himself with her wetness. When she was ready, she pulled him inside. He pushed her bra up, and she twisted underneath him so she could unclasp it. He fought against his impending orgasm. It was a door he needed to keep closed, but everything in his body pressed him to open it.
“I can feel how close you are,” Jessica said. “Do it. I already came.”
John held himself against his orgasm, pressure building until his re-solve faltered, and the force of his climax hurled him out of his body into a weightless ecstasy. Then gravity asserted itself. He tried to withdraw, but Jessica pulled him back.
“Just another second,” she said, arms pulling his weight onto her.
Later, after they had cleaned themselves up, they squeezed back onto the couch. Jessica’s hand rested on his chest.
“Do you think about your family when you’re with me?” she asked.
He lay next to her in an unrefined sludge of contentment, guilt,infatuation, and anxiety. “I try not to.”
“I think about Mark. I want to feel guilty. But it’s like the guilt gets me going, you know? So I think about him before, during, after. It seems kinda fucked up, right?”
“I don’t know. Lots of people have affairs. Maybe it’s common to feel what you’re feeling.”
“Sometimes I feel like a monster.”
“Because you want to be bad?”
“Everyone wants to be bad sometimes. I don’t ever want to be good.”
She ground herself into his thigh.
“I have to go soon,” John said.
“Isn’t she usually asleep by now?”
“What about your husband?”
“He’s probably still out.”
“What time does Cathy get home?”
“She told me she’ll get out of the movie at eleven and call.” She glanced past John at a clock on the wall. “It’s ten thirty now.”
“Think she might want to join? We can wait for her.”
Jessica laughed, but leaned forward and whispered in his ear all the things she would do with her friend for him. She spared no details, no matter how depraved. She climbed on top of him. He couldn’t believe he was erect again already. She glided upward along the length of him until she caught the tip of his cock just inside her. She adjusted her hips to a comfortable angle and slid back.
Inside her again, John felt no urgency to leave. They fucked slow, in no hurry. Then they came to a place where the pace increased. Jessica bent down to kiss him, then raised herself up again.
“Do you ever think of leaving your family for me?” she asked.
“I don’t want to lie to you,” he said.
“I’m not your wife. You don’t have to lie to me.”
“Yes. I think about leaving them for you.” Her weight was fully on his hips, her hands occupied with her own pleasure.
“Good. I like that. Why?”
“Because when you fuck me, I don’t have to feel anything. I don’t have to be anybody. I can just be inside you.”
She smiled.
“I won’t leave them, though.”
“Even if Cathy came back, and we did all the things I told you about?”
“Even then.”
Jessica stopped moving and pouted. Then she bit her lower lip and pushed down on him until he was as deep in her as he could go. “What if you got me pregnant?”
“That would be complicated.”
“No, it wouldn’t. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Like what we’re doing. What if I wanted your baby? Would you give one to me?”
She began moving again, faster. Something in the game, in the concept, excited her. He felt it in how her hips moved, how alive she felt around him.
“What if I told you I wasn’t on the pill? Would you still come inside me?”
“Yes.” If it meant he could be inside her, erased, he absolutely would.
“We can throw these lives away,” she said. “Start a new one. Give me your seed. Let me grow it for you.”
She rode him like she meant every word. She closed her eyes, concentrating, then brought herself to a sharp orgasm. John followed, an aching burst, followed by a drained soreness. Jessica climbed off him immediately. John sat up so she could sit next to him.
“I have to go.”
“I know,” she said. She patted his knee but looked away through the curtained windows.
Shame and thoughts of Jane, work, and the kids trickled into the fleeting emptiness he had achieved like sewage from a leaky pipe. He gathered his clothes. Jessica disappeared to the bathroom.
She returned, still nude. Seeing John dressed, Jessica came to him and kissed him on the cheek, then ushered him the four feet to the door. Of all of the acts in his infidelity—obfuscating, fucking his not-wife, compartmentalizing, concealing—leaving was the most alien to John. He wanted a smooth exit, but each time felt forced, as if he were lingering too long. But on the other side of the door, he felt as if he had fled a restaurant without paying the bill.
He walked down the stairs from Cathy’s apartment to the street, head down, praying he wouldn’t pass anyone who might witness the guilt and shame etched into his face.
#
Hunter read the guilt and shame in John’s face like a new word from one of his children’s books. He scanned his posture, the tightness of his mouth, a slight wrinkle in his brow, and the uncertainty in his eyes the same way he would sound out letters, gleaning meaning from context, adding it to his emotional vocabulary. It was like watching Hunter learn a swear word. John spent years at Jane’s insistence guarding his language, trying to keep piss and ass and shit and fuck out of his children’s mouths, and for what? Their dictionary had been filled with anger, resentment, and self-loathing instead. How could that be any better?
“Why did you cheat on Mommy?” And when John didn’t respond, he insisted. “Answer me.”
Since the kids were born, people loved telling him and Jane things like this kid looks like you, or your wife, or he has your nose, or she has your eyes. But John didn’t need anybody to point it out to know whose fury he was looking at.
“Go away,” he said.
Hunter didn’t move.
John stood and pointed to the door.
Hunter tensed, tears forming in his eyes. But he didn’t leave.
“I want to know,” Hunter said, voice quieter now, shaking. John took a step toward Hunter, still pointing at the door. Halfway to his son, Hunter’s resolve broke and he tried to turn to run. Before John was conscious of it, he was on his knees, with Hunter pinned to the closed door, facing him.
“What?” John growled. “Now you want to leave?”
Hunter was weeping, but not struggling. John understood that Hunter could feel the rage radiating from his father’s hands, passing through his little body like an electric current, preventing any movement, maybe even breath. John felt the child’s flesh yield under his fingers and wondered if he could simply squeeze through it to the bones, to grind them in his hands like a fairy-tale giant. Hunter’s eyes searched his own, absent of the obstinacy from moments ago, now pleading to be spared. In the violent stillness, John was free for a moment of all thoughts except of his desire to break his son’s arms and the thinness of the will that kept him from doing so.
Then John’s hands slid down Hunter’s arms, leaving red impressions where he had squeezed them, until he held Hunter’s hands. John sank back until he sat on his heels like a monk, head bowed, tears running off his cheeks, falling to his lap.
“I’m sorry,” John said. “It just happened. These things just happened. It’s not how I wanted it to be.”
Hunter pulled his hands from his father’s.
John knew he ought to say something, to salvage something from the disgrace. But there was no salvaging, only the debris of his failure slowly sliding along the door until Hunter could open it and slip from the room.