“What had we shared? An intimate exchange, inexplicably charged. And now, just as inexplicably, we shared my wife.” New fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Parking the car, I thought: Maybe the distraught woman won’t even be here, maybe she wasn’t invited this time around, or maybe she had another engagement. Her presence was hardly a given. But as soon as we entered, after P and her husband had welcomed us in, as my wife was already chatting without me in the adjoining room, I caught sight of her.
I made a leisurely loop around the table, picking up some cheese, some crudités, some sliced salami. I was trying to make my presence felt. I couldn’t hear her, all I could hear was my wife’s gravelly voice, which worked its way under my skin even amid all those people. I’d never betrayed my wife, in this city where everyone’s always cheating on everyone. With the exception of my little crush on the girl from the pool, I’d always been a faithful man; I was used to being the one who got dumped or cheated on, even before I met my wife, and not the other way around. I didn’t have infidelity in me, I suppose I lacked the impulse.
“Did you hear that their house was robbed recently?” my wife said as I was parking the car behind a long line of vehicles.“They didn’t have it in a safe?”The house, too, was nearly dark, unfamiliar. They’d removed most of the furniture to make room. P’s daughter greeted us at the door and whisked our coats off to who knows where. I stuck to my wife’s side. We went to get our first glass of prosecco together, to fill our plastic plates with slices of bread, slivers of cheese, honey.
She and I danced, together, on our own. It was a torment, also a triumph. We would lock eyes for a moment, here and there I’d feel my body brushing hers, a shoulder, a hip. The two of us were still nailed to our respective lives, but underneath it all I sensed that we were being reckless, conspiratorial.
They went to grab their purses, they pulled out their phones. Right there on the spot they exchanged numbers, scheduled a date. I envied my wife and yet at the same time I was grateful. There was no way, when they went out together on their walks or to see an art exhibit, that L didn’t think of me. No way my wife didn’t speak of me, of our long marriage filled with the predictable ups and downs, of the flings she’d probably had with other men, of our strained relationship with our son. No way I didn’t factor in to some extent.
“You know, I wouldn’t mind going back there either, finally putting an end to my childhood fear,” my wife announced, referring to that poor man she’d seen die in the pool, decades earlier.
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