Over the course of our marriage, my wife has slept with three men. I mean four, of course, if you count me. I am neither concerned, surprised, or even jealous. Perhaps thankful if you allow me the involuntary irony.
Across thirty years, I suppose, three is a decorous figure, full of connotations and mathematical possibilities. You might be wondering two things: why I am so sure of the number, and how I came upon such private information, assuming the fact that we had never talked about matters of infidelity inside the tight nucleus of our marital enterprise. I have three answers for you: there could have been more men, but my faithful husband weather vane has not been turned by any of these possible lovers’ winds. Only those certain three had shaken the rusty antennas of my instinct and made my neck tendons more alert. Second, with age and good bourbon, I came to the unspoken universal conclusion that all humans have secrets, that those secrets are the solid stalk of our personas, and that nobody really cares about said secrets because of their lack of originality and their weathered quality once compared to the secrets of one’s own. Also, as an added comment, the very few who may care always know about those secrets at different levels of acceptance. The fertile soil of pure love is not beauty, nor intelligence, or surprise, but the hidden nature of the loved one with the implicit burden of impossible-to-confess actions we all carry like a bag of jelly beans. For you who have not yet reached my age or my taste for Evan Williams Single Barrel, please know that the tenuous balance of love is based on the infinitesimal occurrence of those secrets becoming visible. We do not stop loving because we come to know them, we do because there is nothing hidden anymore.
My third, unrequested, answer is that you do not have any chance of wondering about my personal tirade because this text will never be placed in front of your eyes. This is a trite statement. I know, I am a writer. I have read that line myriads of times. “I don’t write for a reader, blah, blah, blah.” But I defy you. I am writing this to be able to edit my own story as I edit the shallow articles magazines demand from me. My words are a mirror made of scrawny spider legs called letters on an immaterial paper I plan to bury in a blue memory stick labeled “IRS-docs-1994.” Who would open such a dreadful promise after I am gone? So, dear non-reader, that is your challenge. Let me go back to my intended landscape of words.
My beautiful wife slept with three other men who were important to her, over the course of thirty years, and in mercurial intervals that sprinkled her tranquil journey next to me. Yes, mercurial I wrote, mercurial in the way she squeezed her slender body inside the interstices of time as if that incorporeal substance of minutes and days were a fork trying to clamp in between its tines her scurrying soul made of vanilla ice cream and caramel syrup. Mercurial as her infinite cloak of hair, grey as mercury now, that never dared not to touch the sweet end of her back and changed colors over the years like the branches of the Japanese cherry tree that reigns over our yard.
Each of those men, with their own sets of circumstances and physical characteristics that I blissfully ignore, witnessed, like I did, her hair coming down. This involuntary quartet happens to have shared that divine spectacle. I cannot accept the idea that she deprived them of the curtain of her mane coming down when she released the amount of sensuality that each one of them deserved. Interestingly to all my psychiatrist friends, that is the image that most haunts me, more than her naked body next to theirs, or the tip of her index finger caressing their knuckles over a romantic dinner. Her hair falling down before a new first kiss and getting in the way of their lovemaking wrenches a main artery inside me and steals the resistance of my bones. Once that image is conjured, I become a dead broken scarecrow bitten by the snakes from Medusa’s scalp under a rain of ink.
Do you, blind reader of mine, need a list? Her third man is irrelevant. He came and went like a phase of a dwindled moon. A bad piece of furniture bought in a rush more because of its availability than its good build. I noticed he existed because she came home trailing a new yellow light. She sat next to me, took off my glasses, and kissed me. She talked incessantly about the unbalance in our state Supreme Court. A lawyer, I guessed, or a very low politician. As she pondered her new ideas, I grasped the aroma of old leaves at an early stage of decay. She rested her head on my lap and the new light emanating from her shoulder blades reminded me of the slight twitch in the atmosphere that you sense before a fall storm. That was her autumn lover.
The second man materialized a decade ago. I intuited him in her new thin gold bracelet and her questions about compound interest rates in short-term mortgages. A banker, I suppose. During their romance, she came home every one of those nights too late, too happy, and too drunk from rose wine and life. That love burned her cheekbones and her cuticles. She cried when she thought I couldn’t see and she bit the end of her nails ravenously waiting for him to rise from a doomed horizon. I called him her summer dear, a scorching spell that suffocated both of them and echoed a serene breeze to our farther nest.
But it is the first man who sometimes terrifies me. Mostly because he is the one she has never hinted at, the one that does not seem to exist. He is a parenthesis with no text inside, an empty hourglass, a ruler with blurred numbers. That is how vaulted she keeps him in her throat and in her lungs, in the inner lining of her purple veins. I know he has to exit because when his capricious fog envelopes her, she straightens her long neck and becomes alert, she looks at me with intense eyes that do not see me, her delicate torso uncurls like a withered sunflower that received a sap transfusion from a magical well. She sings and projects her silvery voice, hugs me in a motherly way, and even asks me what I am writing. When this silenced lover is around, when he lurks around us like a black cloud for me and a rainbow for her, she becomes the queen of a ray of sun and she loves me more. She springs to the heights and looks down to the world as a cougar who has at least found a ribbon of protruding land to savor the regal view of its own valley.
I accept it. She will never leave this cold, this immaculate whiteness of untouched snow that surrounds us, she is warm next to me. I generate the cold and embrace her to guarantee that this is where she needs to remain so those other planets in her system make sense, so those other three stars in this rotten constellation of four don’t fall apart. I might be as sad as the winter but as solid as a compass.
See? You thought that the opposite of winter was summer? You were always so wrong, my friend. The opposite of winter is always the season ahead. The opposite of winter is spring.
