“How’d you find him?” asked the old man, weeping hard now, barely able to talk, but unashamed of his tears. “He’s been gone for a month.”
“I heard him crying,” I said (I lied) and stepped into the doorway. Sharon stood behind me and peered over my shoulder.
“Oh, thank you, bless you,” said the old woman.
“I pulled him out of some blackberry thorns,” I said. “And then I remembered your ad in the newspaper, and I found the paper in the garbage, and I called you, and here I am.”
The old man and woman hugged me, holding the cat between us, all of us celebrating the reunion, while Sharon stood silently by. I think I lied because I wanted to be briefly adored by strangers, to be remembered as a handsome and kind man, a better man, more complete, even saintly. But it was Orwell who wrote that “saints should be always judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”
All during this time, Sharon never spoke. I can only guess at her emotions, but I imagine she was shocked and hurt by my disloyalty. Standing in the presence of such obvious commitment between two people and their damn cat, she must have lost faith in me and, more importantly, in herself.
“How can we ever repay you?” asked the old woman.
“Nothing,” I said. “We need nothing.”
“Here, here,” said the old man as he opened his wallet and offered me a twenty.
“No, no,” I said. “I don’t need that. I just wanted to be good, you know?”
He forced the money into my hand; I accepted it.
“You’re a good man,” said the old woman.
I shook my head, took Sharon’s hand, and walked away, leaving those grateful strangers to their beloved pet.
“Why did you do that?” Sharon asked as we walked.
“I needed to,” I said. That was the best answer I could give her. It wasn’t enough.
“You lied to me, you lied to them, and you took their money,” she said. “How could you do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Sharon broke away from me and ran.
I didn’t see her that night as I got ready for graduation, and I didn’t see her the next morning.
“Where’s Sharon?” asked my mother as she adjusted my cap and gown.
“She’s with her parents,” I said, which was a true statement, I suppose, but hardly close to the truth.
I went through the ceremony alone; Sharon went through the ceremony alone; we sat ten chairs apart.
The day after graduation, Sharon was still missing. I didn’t know where she was. When my mother asked me about her absence, I said she was on a spiritual retreat.
“One month of silence,” I said, lying to my mother, to another woman who loved me. “After a big event, like a graduation or birth, the Apaches leave for a month. It’s an Apache thing.”
“I wish I could do that,” she said. “I think everybody should do that. Make it a law. Once a year, everybody has to be silent for a month. We’d all rotate, you know? You have to be quiet during your birth month.”
“It’s a good idea, Mom, I’m sure it would go over well.”
“Sarcasm is a sin, honey.”
After another day of unceremonial silence, I assumed Sharon had left me forever, and I finally confessed my fears to my mother.
“Mom,” I said. “I love Sharon and I destroyed her.”
Was I overreacting to Sharon’s overreaction? I’d told such a small lie, had taken credit and reward for such a small act of heroism. But then I wondered if Sharon had always had her doubts about my character, and perhaps had always considered me an undependable braggart. What if she’d been gathering evidence against me all along, and I’d finally committed the last unpardonable crime?
“You have to go find her,” my mother said.
“I can’t,” I said, and it was true and cowardly.
My mother turned away from me and cried while she fixed dinner. Later that night, while she washed dishes and I dried, my mother told me how much she still missed my father.
“He’s been gone twenty-two years,” she said. “But I can still feel him right here in the room with us. I can still smell him, his hair, his skin.”
My mother didn’t call my father by name because she wanted the dead to stay dead; I wanted to learn magic and open a twenty-four-hour supermarket that sold resurrection and redemption.
The next morning, Sharon came to see me. I was so grateful for her presence that I leaned against the wall to keep from falling down. My mother hugged Sharon until they both cried. Then Sharon asked my mother to give us some privacy. After my mother left, Sharon took my face in her hands.
“You’re a liar,” Sharon said. “I’m going to marry a liar.”
I didn’t want to ask her why she came back. We were so fragile, I worried that one wrong word could completely break us.
For the next twenty-nine years, we lived as wife and husband, as the mother and father of four kids (Sarah, Rachael, Francis, and Joshua) who suddenly grew into adults and became wives and husbands and mothers and fathers. During our long marriage, Sharon and I buried her mother and father and my mother, all of our grandparents, and many of our aunts, uncles, and cousins. I covered high school sports and reviewed movies for the local alternative weekly; an odd pair of beats, I suppose, but I enjoyed the appearance of being odd while living a sedate life. Sharon ran her own coffee shop and wrote lyric odes she never published. We paid our taxes, owned a modest home, and made love an average of three times a week. We didn’t have nearly as much money as our parents, and that could be viewed as our failure, but we felt successful. We weren’t triumphant, by any means, but we lived a good and simple life, and I often wondered if I deserved it.
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.”
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.” r />
“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.