“This sounds very intellectual,” I said to her. “Clearly, this is a game of the mind.”
“Yes.” She had thought about it a lot during the long days and nights of nursing, she said, and she knew she had to see these men again. She was certain. She needed to see these men again, one more time, as many as would come see her.
I turned a page of the newspaper with tremendous care. I said, “So, this is divorce.”
She had just slid a spoonful of cereal into her mouth. She shook her head and made a face. “This has nothing to do with that,” she said. I nodded. She chewed. I waited. “Look,” she continued, “compared to the time and energy I spent with those guys collectively, you and I just don’t have a prayer. No one would.”
“Aging is fascinating.”
“You just want to say ‘hello.’”
“I imagine there’s more to it than ‘hello.’”
“I’m sleeping in a kitchen chair a lot right now.”
“Right?”
I looked up from the paper. She smiled and shook her head while she crunched her cereal. Our child was sleeping in his swinging apparatus upstairs. We were not to let the child sleep in this or any other swinging apparatus, so we were pretending the child was awake.
I went outside, turned on the spigot, and began watering a patch of yellow lawn near the front porch. Days after she’d given birth, she had mentioned a few of her former lovers by name. But I hadn’t listened. I wasn’t focused on that kind of thing. Things like that didn’t matter to me. The new baby had made me unusually thoughtless. I went to the grocery store about five times a day. When she said our son’s eyes reminded her of Benjamin, the boy tucked like a football under her arm, nursing, I was running out the door to get kefir and organic fruit. I said, “Yeah,” and I locked the door behind me.
The lawn had dried badly. It would not take the water. It pooled as though on cement. After Benjamin, she’d mentioned a few other names too, wistful. Charles came up when it became clear we would need to buy our son a swimsuit for the baby pool—a little infant swimsuit—because Charles used to have the most interesting swimsuits. Charles she would like to see in his swimming trunks again, preferably in Cape Cod, where they had first swum together years ago, when she was nineteen and twenty. And she could also remember him in his navy T-shirt. He had incredible pectorals, Charles, but more importantly he had a way of listening to her talk for hours at a time, a way of making time seem so light and spacious you felt that you’d transcended it. That was Charles, and I’d really not listened. I went back inside.
“I’m worried,” I said to her.
“Me too.”
“Your worst enemy might be doing this badly. Maybe I could do a magic show for all of you.”
She seemed to give this a thought. She looked out the window. Our mutual appreciation of my sense of humor had really degenerated. She said, “I don’t know if you’d be here at all, would you?”
“I don’t play the oboe,” I said.
“I mean, it might be weird to have you two here. I’m not really sure this would be about you or him or us.”
“Right,” I said. “I understand.”
“Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
I did not understand. I do not understand.
I was sleeping in the kitchen chair in those days. At night Kimberly would be up handling our screaming son five, six, ten times. I couldn’t distinguish the first handling from the last. I didn’t know dawn from dusk. I could achieve consciousness instantly, leaping to gather a cloth or a soft thing or an electronic mechanism for her, her voice summoning me from rooms of the house I felt I barely knew, and then I could fall away again in the kitchen chair, uncertain that I’d ever left it, uncertain that I’d ever given her the thing she’d needed. Sometimes she would just materialize across the table from me. I would open my eyes and she would be sitting there across from me. She liked to say, “Are you feeling sorry for yourself?”
Kapler was another early name, Kappy. She had told me, I believe, that our son’s flesh smelled the way Kappy smelled after he’d washed himself. This Kappy apparently used to take exceptionally long baths in a large claw-foot tub made of green porcelain, and he’d had the ability to create these enormous suds of soap that went by a name she could no longer remember. To this too I said nothing, nodding, I imagine, as though she’d made a comical remark about my hair. It’s astonishing in retrospect. My wife went on to say that, like our son, this man could smell like delicious soap all day. She said she wished she could remember the name of that soap. “God,” she said, “I loved that soap.” Then she smelled our son deeply and closed her eyes.
Sometimes at work my colleagues drop by my office and say things like, “Can you believe Reynolds is folding?” Or they say, “Can you believe that, in like two months, we’ll be eating Turkey, Ohio, with spoons?” I always say “I know” to this sort of positing of the future, because while I cannot believe such things in the present moment, having been burned in the past by things that were not what they’d seemed, I trust that I will entirely believe them after they occur. “I know” is my way of acknowledging that I know how hard it is to believe something that seems likely to happen, but has no god-given assurance of actually happening. If one of these young tycoons had swept into my office and said, “Can you believe your wife is going to ask you to write the invitations asking her lovers to come to your house?” I would have said, “I know,” because nothing whatsoever in that period, with a new human having ruptured our lives, nothing in that period would have indicated that she might not, in fact, ask me to write these invitations.
“It’s better if you do it,” she said. “Less awkward.”
“You’d like me to invite your BFs to your BFP.”
“Are you sixteen?” Then she explained that she wanted me to write the invitation from her perspective. She said she wanted me to write the invitation in such a way that it seemed to be written by her—a direct solicitation—but that if pressed she could say she didn’t have “the balls” to write it herself, that “a friend” had written it for her. This would give her the freedom of conscience that she said she needed to be able to look these men in the eye.
“Big Fucking Party,” I said. “You’re pretty sure they’re going to jump at this.”
“Oh,” she said, “they’ll come.”
Where was our child during this exchange?
I told her then that I would be really touched to have the opportunity to drum up the invites, but I mostly wondered if maybe she didn’t simply want to sleep with other men, if this weren’t all one unnecessarily elaborate ruse, if perhaps she felt she needed to go to these lengths to more gently convince me she wanted out of our marriage. I have never been good sexually, and it would not have shocked me to hear her say it. I have a prodigious sense of humor, but I am woeful in sex, I have long known, and certainly I would have been keen on the matter right at that time, right in that stretch following the birth of the child, when the thing that most defined me were the consequences of sex. For her to go to these lengths—it all seemed so unseemly, so executive and corporate. And yet I didn’t blame her. I’m not great with giving pleasure or blame to others. It’s all too direct.
She handed me the empty electric bill envelope sleeve with a list of thirty-six names enumerated on the back—enumerated. I could not be certain if they’d been numbered in terms of chronology or importance. There were names on that list I hadn’t heard of; there were several names I knew well and was surprised to see included.
“I thought Travis was just your brother’s friend,” I said to her.
She gave our son her breast. “Please don’t judge me,” she said. “Most women my age have lists that could roll out the door.”
“Thirty-six?”
She tipped her head to her shoulder. “Don’t judge me.”
“What do you want with Travis?”
She blew on our son’s hair.
“Maybe,” I said, “we should bring in my old girlfriends, really break this thing wide open.”
She laughed. She really started laughing. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh like this since the baby was born. She had a wonderful laugh, and when she really laughed an honest and vulnerable ghost of our pasts emerged. But then the laughter angered our son, and he pulled away from her breast and wailed. That was that. My wife swore at the child and left the room with him.
I had at that point never created an electronic invitation. I have since that time done many, many electronic invitations. I have become quite capable with that technology. I remember that in my first run, the creation of the invitation was neither difficult nor easy, neither pleasing nor horrible. I remember it was more satisfying, when it was all completed, than I’d expected. The primary image of the electronic invitation, which pleased me above all else, bore a clip-art image of businessmen and one businesswoman collaborating on a project in an office cubicle. The woman was sitting behind the computer, her hand on the mouse, with a team of suited men hunkering all around her, behind her, gazing at her work on the screen. One man had his hand on her shoulder. They were all huddled very close. Most were smiling as though a joke had just been told. One or two looked very, very serious: they were not at all amused to be working on this project: “You’re invited to come to my home to see me again—Kimberly!”
Kimberly and I were introduced by friends at a small and overwrought party on the north side of Chicago. At that point we were in our late twenties. Like most graduates of Northwestern, we started our uninspired careers in some approximation of a low-tier business position. We were both living in gritty neighborhoods on the north side. We both thought dogs were funny. We both seemed harmless enough to one another—not particularly cool, or not cool enough to be threatening, and not painfully annoying. We were both interested in being financially solvent without being obsessed or controlling about money, and that was sexy enough to get us started. I asked her on a date to a Cubs game. I hated baseball; so did she. We laughed about it. We left after the second inning. We got tipsy at a bar. We went to her place and slept together. We dated a few more times. Families were met. I proposed. She accepted. We had lame careers in promising full swing. We bought a new condo together with towering metal cabinets in the kitchen and a ceiling as high as the building itself. We waited a few years to have a baby and said to people regularly that we were waiting to have the baby until after we’d lived, having no idea whatsoever what this meant. We traveled once out of the country, to London, and we felt that was enough travel for the rest of our lives. We made a baby. It took a lot of sex. It took a lot of UTIs. We waited and she worked with me on the sex. It happened: the baby came.
Of course I entertained violent acts. I am only human. I am subject to human pain, and I am subject to human helpless rage in the face of human pain. I did not carry the violent acts much further than picturing myself buying a gun and carrying it home to a house full of nude men who were lounging about with long-stemmed goblets of wine in their fists. This violent moment usually culminated in me just sort of standing there in the doorway with my handgun, staring at them having sex with my wife behind flimsy sheer curtains.
But, passivity is not about doing nothing. It has nothing to do with the absence of action. Passivity has nothing to do with allowing things to happen. It simply means you subordinate, make less prominent the agency of action. A great deal can be accomplished in passivity. Take the sudden and inexplicable presence of the e-mail addresses of all thirty-six men, for example. Who knows how these arrived in my electronic invitation? Who knows when or by what means my wife dropped these into the invitation I was to send. Suddenly, they were just there and my job was basically already done for me.
Or, take my plans to sabotage and humiliate my wife, myself, my family, and my life, in response to my wife’s needs. I’m not sure at all how that sabotage came about, but there were the plans, unfurling.
She had been clear about my role: I was to have no salient role. “Let’s just keep it simple.” She’d said simpler was easier. “Guys,” she said, “like simple.”
Within two hours of my having sent the invitations, seventeen of thirty-six responses had been returned. They were interested. One of them responded with the “Hell Yee-ah!” button. The washing machine was on. Someone had poured me a glass of juice, or someone had put it in my hand. Men on the West Coast were replying to my wife’s invitation at two in the morning their time. They wrote additional notes to her like “Kick Your Ass Soon!” and “You Rocking!” and “Can’t wait babes!” Somewhere my son was screaming at my wife. A man named Kit wrote in his message that “Strange is for people who do not know anything other than their own lives.” He too used the “Hell Yee-ah!” button.
“I just can’t believe,” she said at some point around dawn, “how much these guys want to see me.”
“You’re a fascinating person,” I said.
She began exercising. She gave me the child and a bottle of formula, and said, “Go time.”
I looked down at my son and plugged his unhappy little mouth. “Everything’s new,” I said.
She started a video in the living room that promised to shred her. She was shredded by a militant dark-haired woman in almost no clothing for forty-five minutes. The boy fell asleep in my arms while we were watching his mother move rapidly, in harsh and hostile motions. I flinched whenever she had to thrust. The boy was rapt until he slept. The woman shredding my wife, she was just terrifying.
Then my wife went outside and ran down the street. I quickly put the sleeping child in a stroller and tried to keep up with her, but she was running so fast and so far I couldn’t, after a while, see her in the distance. I just kept walking. After several miles, I returned the way I’d come, expecting to find her there at home, perhaps in the shower. But she wasn’t there, and she didn’t appear until she hobbled into the kitchen almost two hours later. She said, winded, “Fuck.” She had her hands on her hips. She was slick and foul. She tore her clothes off and went upstairs, where she would fall asleep on the bathroom floor, the shower running. I found her there.
All thirty-six invitations had been Received within twenty-eight hours. No one had pushed the “So Sorry” button. One wrote to communicate that he “Can’t Say Fo Sho.” They were all very excited, very spirited, and very capable of dropping everything in their middle-aged personal and professional lives to see my wife. My wife was very flattered by it all. I discovered her in the middle of a regrettable conversation with her sister one afternoon. She said, “I doubt he remembers that.” Then she was silent as her sister spoke. Then she laughed in a way that seemed, frankly, a little hurtful.
But the earliest construction of sabotage took shape in half-consciousness at our kitchen table in the middle of the night. Our son was screaming upstairs. A woman approached me. She had three men flanking her. She was dressed in a barista’s smock. The men wore burlap coffee sacks. She winked at me and said, “How do, Simple?”
I winked back at her and said, “I like it simple.”
That’s when I came to, my wife at the table staring at me, midsentence. “Did you hear anything I just said to you?”
“Yes.” I rubbed my face. She nodded. It became obvious how to ruin her expressed needs.
Good old Jamie wrote, “I cannot wait to hold you again.” He was the single “Can’t Say Fo Sho” and had now switched to a “Hell Yee-ah!”
I remembered Jamie. Kimberly had told me several times before the baby about Jamie, and that Jamie was the best kisser she’d ever dated. She’d said that, for all his problems, and she never said what those problems might have been, for all his problems Jamie always knew how to kiss. And she used to tell me that Jamie had told her that she kissed very nicely too, and because she had kissed a great many people in her life, had experienced some of the worst kissing any human had ever experienced, she knew what good kissing was, and when a good kisser compliments you, you know you’re getting high praise.
This was a tricky one, because I didn’t exactly think Kimberly was a great kisser. She had a dry mouth and a small, coarse tongue that always felt, I thought, too insistent. My wife had many outstanding qualities; kissing wasn’t on the top of that list. I imagined that either Jamie was lying to take advantage of my wife when she was younger, or he was in fact not that great at kissing at all, which would probably mean that she liked Jamie for reasons unrelated to kissing and either couldn’t accept this or wasn’t fully aware of it, or was fully aware of her expansive interest in Jamie and needed, somehow, to express it indirectly to the man she had actually chosen to marry.
Thirty-six men were coming to my house to see my wife, because she had asked. She had simply asked if thirty-six men would like to fly from around the country to celebrate her thirty-first birthday, and thirty-six men said they would like to do so. “A great many men like your mommy,” I said to our son. I was trying to make the child belch but not vomit. I had him pitched over my shoulder, and I could feel the burning in my legs as I bobbed up and down. I tried to make a little song out of it, trying over and over again to think of the word that rhymed with “mommy.”
I was alone with our son more often, and he became increasingly unhappy with my company. He was developing mistrust. The mother would hand him to the father, and the father would never hand him back. My son did not like that. His dislike intensified. He stopped falling asleep while eating. He would drink the entire bottle I offered him, top to bottom, just suck the hell out of that thing in long, angry drags, and instead of closing his eyes, he would become increasingly alert as he drank, increasingly anxious and angry, and when that bottle was emptied he would burst into a scarlet song that could devastate windowpanes.
And sometimes Kimberly would just walk past the two of us like this, and the child would smell her and immediately stop his singing. He would whimper, and the whimper would precipitate well-documented physiological realities that Kimberly had hoped to shred, she’d said, and she would flee the room then, and the child would begin singing again, and it came to a point, about mid-July, where Kimberly would ask me where I planned to be with the child and for how long, so that she could plot her life around this.
Airplane tickets had been purchased and electronically expressed to each boyfriend, after not just a few hundred hours of e-mails and communiqués securing necessary travel information from the strange men on the other end of the wires. Hotel reservations had been made. Dietary requests had been received, processed, and forwarded. I felt extraordinarily grateful that the limousine company had thrown in a fourth vehicle without charge for the weekend. In total, preliminary estimates seemed to point toward a weekend costing just under one hundred thousand dollars. I slid these figures across the table to Kimberly, who studied them and said, “But when you consider how much we’re getting, though.”
Someone at my office had suggested I might put in for a better-paying position that had just opened up. I hadn’t really considered needing more money until that time. The sabotage would double the cost of the arrangements, and I wondered how people who didn’t have money managed to hold together a marriage with children. I wondered what someone like, I didn’t know, a teacher did with marriage. Being married was expensive. It perplexed me for a while, before I fell asleep, how the rest of the world could afford to stay married.
The sabotage of course required a destination, a simulacrum of ours, and I found a nice five-bedroom rental outside Madison without too much difficulty. My coworkers loved the idea of a party so much they willingly and eagerly dolled it all up, helped pull the catering, drinks, and music together. When it comes to parties, young singles don’t ask many questions. Not many single people worry about the logistics of planned social events. The men from my office would blend in with my wife’s lovers. My specific roots are northern Midwest, settlers near Green Bay, and while we know our way around the labyrinth of deception, because we are half the time misleading ourselves, we are not actually well prepared genetically for the confined chambers of overt and sustained lying. We don’t have the energy for it. Yet, this all came together so seamlessly, so naturally, it took the breath away.
Ten days out, I took on some troubleshooting from work:
Kit could purchase sandals in a store not far from the house, yes.
Matthew could be driven to see his great aunt in a relatively nearby city, yes.
Patrick and Steven T. would not find the humidity terribly high at night.
Link could not expect to have oral sex again while high on cocaine, no, but Kimberly really missed those days too, and only in the stark contrast of her present life can she take pleasure in what was, for her, a very difficult emotional time.
David had to realize that he was not the only man being invited to the event, and could not therefore expect to take one of his “special drives” again.
Benjamin had a great memory, and he was welcome to bring photographs, of course, but Kimberly did not actually remember the time they had fallen asleep in the hotel sauna in Gainesville, was he sure it was her?
It did not seem likely that Kimberly would be able to have a private dinner with Ken, Rick, or Steven L.
Christopher should be grateful he had a wife and family, and there was no need to denigrate them in writing (or in speech), and he should keep his personal shit private or else he would find himself disinvited.
No, Dick, Kimberly did not hang on to that sweatshirt of his, she doesn’t think, but she could buy him another one on eBay if he wants. She is sorry about that.
Some of the basic ground rules permitted that I could answer in the affirmative if I were asked if I was her husband and the child’s father—she said she could not bear the thought of me having to lie about this—but I was not permitted to bring the matter up with any of the guests. And, generally speaking, I was discouraged from being around at all. I was to remain in the bedrooms upstairs throughout the scheduled events. I was not to feel that I had to remain upstairs—she said she could not bear the thought of me feeling as though the child and I were being imprisoned in our own home, locked in some attic like mental invalids from literature—but Kimberly had been clear that I should feel as though it would be best for her if I were to minimize my interaction with the events. If I did come downstairs, with or without the child, I would be encouraged, she said, to not overdo the protective husband thing. Don’t say things like, “We’ve been happily married for, et cetera, et cetera.” That’s annoying. “Don’t spoil this for me.” And I was not to let them gaze at the child. “Keep the child out of sight as much as possible,” she said. She had typed up and printed many of these considerations, and number fifteen was phrased, “Do not go out of your way to stress my relationship to either of you.”
I took the e-mail addresses from the women who responded to the paper-plate tags I posted in the grocery store. Seventeen females and three males responded. I created another electronic invitation, this one with a clip-art image of a girl dancing in a shower of ticker tape, and invited them for interviews at the Madison simulacrum. They each arrived on time, and they each interviewed for twenty minutes. I took down information with pen and paper. I told them everything about the evening. I told them what the expectations were, and what they were not. I told them that they should only think about this as a chance to meet some new guys, pretending to have known them without really stressing that knowledge. “It’s been, in some cases, fifteen years,” I pointed out, “so you can basically just keep saying, ‘I have no idea,’ and go from there.”
Not one of them flinched. I felt a cinder block in my stomach and imagined my knuckles coursing against a sidewalk throughout these interviews, but not one of my candidates flinched at the prospect of openly lying to deceive the wife of a complete stranger. It all seemed entirely appropriate to them. It all seemed like something they’d done before, something they would likely have to do again. And in the end, the woman I chose was the woman who said to me, “Look, I’ve been married for eight years, and I’m just looking to bring a few options back onto the table for myself.”
“You understand thirty-six men will be in the room for the specific purpose of talking at you.”
“I understand that, yes.”
“Do you want to know why we’re doing this?”
She laughed. “Your brain is worth eight thousand dollars cash, and mine isn’t.”
The night before the men were to arrive, Kimberly tried on dresses. It was nearing ten o’clock. She was spinning and turning, looking at herself in the full-length mirror. She had lost the weight she’d gained from the pregnancy, and more, actually, though she didn’t think so. She kept pressing on her stomach. She was saying she hoped this was a good idea, but I watched her and openly doubted that she was seriously questioning her event.
“Hormones hatch some crazy shit.”
“I could cancel this thing in an instant.” I snapped my fingers.
Kimberly just turned from side to side and looked over her shoulder in the mirror. She didn’t say anything. And I didn’t continue asking. Our child sucked on her bra straps on the floor.
The men were varied, mostly dark haired. They struck me as older than I’d expected. They appeared to have aged much, much worse than I had. When they approached me at the airport (I had a sign I was holding outside of Security), I asked the more attractive and assertive ones how they were doing. I couldn’t help myself. I had been told not to speak with them at all. But I felt it would have been irresponsible to have followed this advice. Part of me thought my wife, deep down, would have wanted me to do this against her expressed will.
I asked James, a tall man in sandals, from Des Moines, if he was looking forward to the weekend. James said he wasn’t sure. He said he found the whole thing surreal. “It kind of blows my mind,” he said. When he received the invitation his first thought was, apparently, “Yes, absolutely,” and it was only after he’d accepted the invitation that he realized how odd it was. “She’s probably married and divorced,” James said. “I hate divorced women.”
“Seems like you have a lot you want to share,” I said.
James slapped me on the back.
I piled him into the limousine with about a third of the other men. I told them to have a few drinks, compliments of the lady, and that they could freshen up at the hotel before they were taken to the house.
I thought my wife looked younger, standing there in the stunning disaster that had been her plans. The caterers were whispering. I’d called her several times over the course of several hours to let her know that no one had come through the security checkpoints. I had by then dropped off most of the men at their hotel and driven back to our home. The musicians were rehearsing and then sitting silently, looking at their strings. A handyman we’d hired quietly fiddled with the hanging lanterns. Kimberly just stared off. She had read the e-mails I sent to the men. “But how could no one have seen your sign?” she wanted to know. “Is it really possible they would all simply take advantage of the free airfare and ignore the signs?”
“They’ll call.”
She looked at me. I knew she knew something was amiss. I didn’t care. I told her I would go back to the airport. She seemed to know something was wrong, but she seemed grateful to at least hope that she knew nothing. I did not understand. I could not understand. So I left under the ruse of the airport and followed the sabotage.
I remember that at first I felt I needed someone who looked like my wife to pull this off. My wife has a sort of fair-haired Swiss Miss Danish princess look, and I found it excruciating to approach women with an eye toward their physical similarities to my wife. The woman I ultimately chose was blonde, but she did not look at all like my wife, not really, not now and not in the years she would have known quite a few of these men. I remember hoping the men had forgotten what she looked like. I really bit my nails about this. But I don’t know what I was thinking. I could have brought in a Hungarian farmer from the eighteenth century.
Twenty-nine men fill a room in an unpleasant way, I discovered on that Friday evening, and the remaining seven men, who trickled in later, made it even worse. The idea that I should leave my wife alone among this hot throng struck me as impossibly naïve. Most of the men seemed uneasy but eager. The woman I’d hired to be my wife seemed not at all affected. She was speaking with a small group and laughing, and touching their shoulders, touching her hair. She was introducing them to one another. She was talking about what they’d done together, when, where, and the extent to which it pleased or horrified her. She was somehow very natural at this, and it occurred to me that what I’d asked her to do was not really that different from courtship, where most of what you communicate are heavily sutured falsehoods.
Most of the men were more than pleased to help her where she made mistakes in their histories. Most of the men seemed to know immediately this woman was not Kimberly, my wife. But if they did know, they didn’t care, or they were willing to overlook it. They drank heavily, and they ate everything they could eat. They swam in the rented pool. They began making phone calls. They played with my son’s fingers and they surprised him with peek-a-boo. They shook hands with my coworkers, and they chased after other women and men I’d invited from the office.
I tried to see my wife in this context. I tried to see her touching her hair and touching the shoulders of these men. I tried to ask my son if he liked seeing Mommy having so much fun like this, and he cried.
I approached my proxy wife and interrupted her conversation with Link and Jess and David M. She looked at me suspiciously. She looked worried. She tried to take the hands of my son, who was pinned to my chest in the Björn, but I turned to my side. I said, “Hi.”
She smiled and tried to turn back to the guys who were, in odd manners of masculinity, reaching to shake my hand and introduce themselves to me. I kept my eyes on her, however. I thanked her. “This,” I said. “This was a really special idea.”
She nodded.
The guys around us agreed, though they looked at one another then, with some strangeness. I apologized for interrupting them, and I asked what they’d been discussing. They seemed not to know. So I said, “What’s it like seeing all your boyfriends again?”
“It’s better than planned,” she answered.
“I remember,” I said, “when I first started dating you.”
She just looked at me, shifting back on her hip and taking a sip of her drink. She seemed to concede that she had not known who I was or what I would be capable of.
I put my hand on her shoulder. I looked her squarely in the eyes. She had delightful, lively eyes. She looked, in a way, frantic. In another way, she looked exhausted. “I feel,” I said, “like I don’t know you. I feel like, standing here looking at you, maybe I’ve never known you.”
Some of my coworkers were looking at me. They’d met my wife. They tried to conceal their fascination. They thought, surely, that no one could remain what they’d always been. People change, they surely thought. Surely they thought, How bizarre, monogamy. And as though I somehow stood at the foot of all things reliable in their lives, surely they thought, What the hell comes next?
“Well,” she said, “we were never as close as you thought we were.”
The men liked this. They whistled and rallied behind her. I laughed. She was a good sport. I said that her trampishness was so complete I doubted very much if there was a man in the room who could say he didn’t feel as though she knew him better than he knew her.
She nodded. “Last time I checked,” she said, “that’s the way men prefer it.”
“Are you married?” I asked her.
She shrugged.
The men cheered. I noticed Steven T. was growing anxious. He had something he wanted to say.
“Listen,” I said to her. “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Let’s leave this B-squad here to give one another handjobs, and let’s just stop pretending.”
She looked confused. She considered it. I felt it then, and I feel it now. She really gave it some sincere thought. I don’t know what she would have done with me had she left. But Steven T. didn’t like it. He had heard enough, and he came between us, and he looked in my face. “Take that fucking baby out of here,” he said.
I laughed. My son had fallen asleep. I went in to give my strange employ a kiss, and Steven T. pushed me away from her. The room bristled. My coworkers started moving in toward me and Steven T. There was some pushing. I stood my ground. “Kimberly,” I said. “Come on. Come with me. These guys are not for you.”
She nodded, and she looked right in my eyes. My fake wife gave us long, deep consideration. She made a big show of her teeth. She turned, and I walked home to my real wife with my son’s head lolling in slumber before me.
In her view of the event, I imagine, my Kimberly stood before these men and made them at ease, the way she had done when they had been younger and together in various ways. She was an easy person with whom to talk and be. She was not overly proud of her intelligence, and her intelligence was not so impressive that she suffered from self-awareness. She listened relatively well, and she was very funny. She was incredibly, strangely sharp at games, board games and social/interactive games that involved guesswork and feeding people suggestions toward a specific answer. In her mind, I imagine, she wanted to experience the rush that is putting people at ease, of making them comfortable enough to be reasonable. She had lost this, she felt, and she desperately wanted it restored. She could do a job. She could run a marathon. She could keep a budget and make more or less anything she needed to make with her bare hands. She could nurse a child. She could be married. She could make a clown good at sex. But she could not be who she had been, and that upset her, and she told me someday I would understand. But I did not understand. I do not understand so much, and I did feel sorry for myself when she contacted a few of the men directly in the months that followed, and the pieces of the sabotage fell into obvious place. It looked as clunky to her then as it looks to me now, and it feels as childish to me now as it did to her then.
I tried to speak to her directly about all of it, but when I looked into her eyes, I found myself looking into a mirror with about thirty-six strange faces looking back at me. She studied me as one studies a fraction, and she asked me to please accept her need to end our marriage. We split our son down the middle. She wanted half, and she wanted me to have the other half. I look at him now, at the half that I have chosen, and I want to give it back to the rest of him, still having no understanding of how a person is built.