Infidelity

You're not supposed to be here.

You know that, of course, but equally you know you would have ended up here one day, as inevitable as drawing the next breath.

The afternoon is humid, the sky turning the color of a bruise, testament to the forecast of rain on the television. You spent the late morning tooling around in the kitchen, sipping your tepid coffee and staring at the wall, anxiety rolling over in your stomach like the clouds on the horizon. The summer has been cramped and rainy and you've been alone for much of it. Natural, when your husband has his own business, when he has to travel, a different part of the tri-state area every day. 

You worry too much, he tells you often, but you don't see it that way. Intuition, you call it, so hours after he pulls out of the driveway, you put down your cup with a dull finality and make your way to his office, down the long hallway and up a short set of stairs to the enclosed loft area he retreats to at the end of each day.

Your husband is a reasonable man, not some forbidding patriarch. You've always had a mutually respectful relationship. He understood when you wanted to be a stay-at-home wife, didn't denigrate your ambitions either when the children left the nest and you started your own businesses- selling your art, curating your garden. It's not that you're not allowed to be here- the sense of wrongness comes more from your reasons, from the tightly coiled thing in your chest that's been building like a summer thunderstorm, the thing you now label as dread. 

The stairs creak on your way up, little screams to reconsider. You've never come up here in all the time of your marriage- why would you need to? You took pride in that virtue- let the men be men, let them have their caves and joys and pastimes. You weren't some nagging wife, some meddlesome harpy like Sonia next door. 

You turn the knob, half-thinking it will be locked. 

It's not. Of course it's not. Why would it be? For a moment, you only stand in the door, listening to the slow creeping tick of the clock above the desk, the little gold pendulum swishing back and forth, back and forth. 

It's neat in here- almost wrongly comically so. You used to tease him about that when you first got married, though he didn't seem to find it funny. Everything in its right place, he liked to say, like it was some great law of the universe, and you agreed. You valued tidiness yourself, almost as much as you valued agreeableness and privacy. It was part of what made you two a great couple. Everyone said so. 

But now you walk across the pristinely swept wood floor to the desk and pull out the top drawer- it sticks a little at first, maybe due to humidity, maybe old age, but it pulls out smoothly after. It too is orderly, filled with pens and pencils and a thick writing pad. In this last, the pages are torn off to feature a blank one, the imprints of past letters made by the steady press of a confident hand cutting into the flesh beneath. One pen stroke appears to have gone too deep, causing a partial tear, and you run your finger over this raised abrasion, squinting at the hint of the word that must have caused such passion. After a moment, you slide the drawer shut and go to the next one down, on the side of the desk, trying not to think about the betrayal you're completing, a basic, low, meddling woman. If he could see you now, you know, he wouldn't even be angry- just disappointed. 

Just once, you think. Just once and never again. And you pull out the next drawer, a long, deep file drawer, filled with neatly alphabetized items. You scan them briefly before pushing it shut again. Somehow rifling through them feels like too much. You already feel dirty (as you should), but there's one more drawer to go, the one nearest the floor, and as you pull at the handle, you feel a solid resistance that can't be chalked up to humidity alone. 

A lump moves into your throat; the ticking of the clock grows louder in the ensuing silence. You sink down into the squashy olive-green desk chair and look around the room. There's nothing to see- a couple of old maps hung on the wall, torn from an almanac and neatly pressed into standard frames. A picture collage you gave him for Christmas one year, featuring both of you and the children, younger, on a camping trip and a trip to Disney World. You stare a moment at your face in the center of a group photo. Unlined, youthful, innocent. Then there's the old clock, dated enough it still needs to be wound weekly, the pendulum twitching back and forth, the cloudy bronze dully reflecting the overhead lights. You turn your attention back to the desk, to the black screen of the boxy monitor, and then, on impulse, grapple with the edges of the plasticine mat on the desk’s surface, getting your nails underneath, arthritis complaining only slightly as with a small whoosh like a breath of air, you lift it free. There's something beneath, and you know what it will be before you retrieve it: a small silver key.

You look at the keyhole on the bottom file drawer before bending towards it, inserting the key- which fits, as you knew it would. The drawer pulls out smoothly on its tracks and you find yourself staring into a deep, empty basin, sans files. Perhaps a relief you can't put reason to surges through you before you push the chair away, bend lower and see it in the very back: a small, wooden cigar box. You spare a moment to think of all the late nights, the work trips that stretched too long. Not strange when you were younger, maybe, when he had to work to keep what family you had together and fed, but now- when retirement was ripe for the taking, when he could have quit ages ago, it's harder to ignore. There's still time to reconsider, you maybe think, be the wife who smells perfume on her husband's clothes and puts them in the wash anyway, but somehow you know you've already come too far, that this small wooden box will be sitting at the back of your mind like it's sat in the back of the drawer, a leaden weight.

So you flip the latch on the box and open it with faintly trembling hands that can't decide if they're old or afraid. 

It's not what you thought, though you weren't sure what you thought. Inside, there's a mix of items that almost resembles a junk drawer until you look at the components more closely. A set of keys with a gym membership attached, a place neither of you have attended, a place you don't even recognize from driving past. A necklace with a small, dainty charm bearing the initial C. A silver Pandora bracelet with several baubles attached. Inexplicably, a chapstick and a cheap Bic lighter patterned with roses. The box is filled to the brim with these incongruent items, but that isn't all. Your hands go to the upper left corner where there's a stack of thick plastic cards held together with a rubber band. You grope it off and take them apart, laying one down next to the other, reading the names and seeing the pictures, the headshots frozen in time, reading words printed in miniature as well as you can through the tears that are threatening to blur your vision, the fear that has started to bloom like blood from a wound in your head. License Number. State- all different states. Name, date of birth. Sex: F, F, F (that part consistent with your fears, at least). Eye color. Date of issue.

Expiration.

You push away, and I watch your grainy image freeze as the doorbell rings downstairs, cracking the silence like lightning through the heart of a desiccated tree. Just the delivery guy, of course. I won't be back until tomorrow. I wasn't supposed to be back for another week of course, but unforeseen circumstances call for unforeseen measures. 

I did love you, Irene. Do, still. We had a good run, raised beautiful children. I don't relish what I'll have to do next. 

And I'm not angry. Just disappointed.