Whenever I came into a room and found Robert there already, it was a feeling like the feeling of returning to a room after realizing you left your keys behind. It was like feeling the need to be busy, immediately, with your hands.
“Oh,” I say, and smile.
“Sure,” he says, but I haven’t asked him anything.
It was like this and it was like something else entirely. Beneath this discomfort, was a feeling more cinematic, nearly like life in a movie.
I think he’s having an affair, I thought. I think he’s seeing other women.
And I didn’t mind so much the fact of it, but what bothered me was the way it made him drag his feet and mope around the house.
“I’m going to my mother’s,” I told him when I could no longer stand his sulking. “Sure,” he said. “Okay.”
But I didn’t go to my mother’s, I went instead to the house of a man who had once propositioned me.
“I said what?” this man said, when I reminded him.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. I just needed somewhere to stay.
When I let this new man fuck me, it wasn’t good or bad or like much of anything at all. I didn’t even feel vindicated.
“How was that?” he asked. “Surprising,” I told him.
He was tall with hair that fell forward and he was practically a stranger to me. He was gone during the days because of his job. He kept cartons of organic raspberries in his fridge. There was some sort of weedy herb garden propagating on his windowsill. I didn’t know what to do with myself. It got to be that in the evenings I would be so eager for him to return, that even the weather seemed lewd. The air out the front door smelled like island air.
After I had been in that man’s house for nine days, I decided to visit him at his work. I brought bars I made in his oven with ingredients I found in his pantry. They were in some way lemon bars, with graham cracker involved as well. It wasn’t until I was standing there, having handed him the bars, that I knew it was all wrong.
When I came back home, there was a woman sitting on my sofa. She was the sort of woman I may have passed at the bank or in line for a bus. She was wearing big, loose-fitting clothes and I couldn’t notice much about her figure.
I didn’t have any questions, but I thought I ought to, so I asked if my husband was home. I didn’t say my husband, because I had no ill-will toward this woman; I just called him Robert. Instead of answering me directly, she asked, “Have you thought about the possibility that he doesn’t love you?”
“Of course,” I said. “I think about it all the time.”
She smiled, but it wasn’t cruel, only content, like she was happy for me, happy that I wasn’t as naive as all that.
“You’re the other woman,” I said to her. I said it nearly like it was a question. She looked troubled when I said it, dropping her head and staring past me. “No,” she said. “I’m just another woman.”
Then Robert came running down the stairs. He was naked to the waist and out of breath, wearing boxer shorts and black ankle socks. “Oh,” he said. “You’re back.” He ignored the woman on our sofa. The way he spoke to me made me suddenly nervous that I would not be allowed back into the home. I became very docile then, magnanimous even, and set a hand on his arm near his shoulder. His skin was harder than I remembered, and I could feel his blood pumping beneath it. “That’s fine,” he said. “It’s okay.”
He walked away and, seeing me staring into the place where Robert had disappeared, the woman on the sofa took my hand. “The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope,” she said. I pulled my hand away.
I wasn’t going to leave the house again, even if I wasn’t wanted. But when I went to the bedroom to hide away and think, I found another woman sitting on the mattress. Two women, in fact, the second standing beside the chest of drawers. Both women had blond, bobbed hair. They were very pretty in the way women who report from hurricanes on television are pretty.
“Who are you?” I said to them. They glanced at one another and then back at me. “We’ve asked to be here,” the one on the mattress said. They were not twins, only two blonde-haired women who had made their hair and faces look alike. Something about the way they were watching me, and my not knowing what to say, made me very angry. “Are you fucking my husband?” I asked, taking a step further into the room. “Are both of you—and that woman downstairs—are the three of you fucking my husband?” The one beside the drawers looked concerned. She watched the woman on the bed to see how she would respond. “Yes,” said the woman on the bed. “Of course we are.”
“We’ve asked to be here,” the woman at the drawers reiterated.
I was determined to find Robert, to make him explain. As I searched the house for him, I found many other women. They were in almost every room—sitting, or standing, watching the doorways as I poked my head through and looked. When I passed the woman on the sofa again, she smiled, gesturing with her fingers as if to wave. The rest of the women saw me and sometimes looked friendly or sometimes hostile, but they hardly moved at all. They were relaxed and looked perfectly comfortable in the rooms of my home.
I found Robert in the guest bedroom. He was sitting on the lap of a woman with long red hair that fell down across her shoulders. She, like Robert, was naked to the waist. It was a sight to see. She dwarfed Robert, and he sat nestled against her breasts, tucked against her shoulder. It wasn’t that she was a particularly large woman, but it seemed instead that Robert had shrunk in her arms. The two of them stared passively, as if waiting for me to make a claim. I didn’t know where to begin so I said nothing, only stood and took the brunt of their contented complexions.
Finally, seeing that I was without words, Robert spoke, letting out a long breath and saying in a quiet, tender voice, “I feel stifled.” The red-headed woman stroked his hair. “I have felt stifled for a long time,” he said to me. His voice was unaffected and he was so small against the woman that I nearly lost my anger and pitied him.
There were women, I noticed, standing at the window in the yard, looking in on us. In the hallway, too, I thought I heard them gathering.
“I don’t know what to make of all this,” I said to Robert.
Stepping nearer, I realized that he must really have shrunk, because the woman beneath him was no larger than I was, no taller at least. He reached with his small child's hand to stop her petting and doting, and she turned away, disinterested. Robert looked at me intently. “Do you believe in the possibility of love?” he asked, and he was quite serious. If he had asked under different circumstances, I may have had a passable answer, but as it was, I didn’t feel anything I might say would be adequate in the slightest. “I don’t know,” I said. “Should I?” “Oh yes,” he said, and when he smiled, I saw that his teeth were like small, very white pebbles in his mouth. “It is a wonderful thing to be loved.”
He turned, then, and began kissing the red-headed woman on her neck and on her clavicle which bumped beneath her neck. At the touch of his lips, she arched her back. Her hair fell off her shoulders onto the bed.
There were not women gathered in the hallway as I had supposed. The hallway was empty, and I walked until I found the woman on the sofa. I sat with her because, of all the women I had so far encountered, she looked at me the kindest. I saw her differently now, noticing that she was quite a bit older than I suspected at first. Wrinkles around her mouth made her lips pucker and fold. The skin of her neck, too, was loose and tanned. Her hair was stringy, shining with an unhealthy sheen. She looked sick, and somewhat like I imagined myself looking in some distant future. She tightened her mouth when I sat down and her lips grew thin, the wrinkles in her face protracted and flattened. I wanted to ask about my husband, I wanted her to explain something to me, but instead I asked, “Is this still my home?” “Of course,” she said, setting a frail hand on my thigh. Her knuckles, I noticed, bulged like acorns.
From down the hall came the sounds of love-making behind the guest room door. I laid my head in the lap of the woman. I felt the touch of her finger tracing the curve of my ear and the soft skin on the side of my neck. “I know that it’s difficult,” she said quietly.
