“Just be glad you can still feel it. I feel a little . . . numb now. Dead down there.” I wondered if she was making it sound worse than it really was. Sometimes I did that to compensate for people’s lack of imagination. But I had plenty of imagination so maybe I should take all of this down a notch. “There’s no hormonal drive now so it all becomes mental,” she continued. “I have to create a narrative that makes it possible, otherwise it starts to feel like rape.”

This was new for her? I’d always had to get out ahead of sex, dig an inclined trough so it could flow easily downhill. Being walloped, pounded by lust was very recent. Very. I told Mary about body- versus mind-rooted arousal. “It sounds like you used to be body-rooted.”

“Oh, definitely,” she said, laughing, “but I don’t even recognize that person now, my old lustful self. I can’t imagine doing the things I did.”

I was far outside of Monrovia when I started walking back to the motel. As I came down to Earth I wondered if I’d misunderstood the fork in the road Mary had been talking about. I’d thought the two paths were:

sex with Davey  vs.  a life of bitterness and regret

But maybe the road split between:

a life spent longing  vs.  a life that was continually surprising

like this night had been. While I didn’t have the narcotic high Davey gave me, there was another kind of elation and it was, among other things, weirder. I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.

I lay on my bed with wide-open eyes, shivering but somehow unable to get under the covers. I could hear the murmur of Harris’s voice on the phone; he was telling someone what had just happened. I imagined getting up right now, slipping out the front door and finding that all the women in the neighborhood were also leaving their houses. We were all running to the same field, a place we hadn’t discussed but implicitly knew we would meet in when the tipping point tipped. We ran like horses, but we weren’t horses, so after the initial hugs there wasn’t anything to do there in the grass. Everyone started checking their phones to see if their partners were calling and they weren’t. Not yet. We hadn’t been gone long enough. Soon it was just a million women waiting for their mates to call, to be needed, and then to fall into panic and guilt, to be torn, which was our primary state. Start the revolution here, now, in this field? Or drive home and slip back into the fold, use the electric toothbrush, feel grim and trapped? Of course there was no decision to make because we were all already home, not in a field. There was no collective tipping point. Most of us wouldn’t do anything very different, ever. Our yearning and quiet rage would be suppressed and seep into our children and they would hate this about us enough to do it a new way. That was how most change happened, not within one lifetime but between generations. If you really wanted to change you had to believe that you were both yourself and your baby; you had to let yourself be completely reborn within one life. Of course the danger was in risking everything, destroying everything, for nothing. As I had done tonight.

I tried to watch a TV show everyone was talking about, but all the references to sex and marriage and infidelity made me weep and that’s what the show was about. I almost wished for an FMH flashback just to be taken out of the present, even for a second. The NICU was hell, but we were together in it, it was part of our long history. Even if I started a new, more open relationship immediately after the divorce and stayed with that person for fifteen years, it wouldn’t be the same stretch of life. Coming into ourselves as parents and adults—none of that would happen with anyone else. If there was anything meaningful about aging, it was tunneling backward in time together, holding memories as a couple so they made a kind of safe basket in a rough and arbitrary world—not just for Sam but for us.

When I didn’t pack my bag for Monrovia on Wednesday morning (why would I go?), Sam and Harris both seemed disappointed. Sam wanted another pizza night and Harris wanted a break from our silent, relentless war. Fair enough. As I drove I suddenly realized these nights apart were probably the first steps toward divorce. Divorce, of course. I gasped alone in the car. I had truly believed we would break through at some point. I could still imagine the older versions of us, laughing fondly about something the other one always did.

Harris walked into the kitchen as we were finishing up. He paused, watching us smooth on the monkfruit-sugar frosting. I held my breath.

Almond cookies with jam in the middle, grain-free banana muffins, carrot custard—even when they turned out all wrong Harris always gobbled them up, which was the highest praise. Praise I maybe couldn’t live without. I was suddenly united with a long lineage of women who fixed everything through food; terror can really strip you of your modernity.

If he eats a cupcake we’re going to be okay.

He paused.

“There’s cream in the middle,” Sam said with great urgency. We were both praying.

But Harris was only looking for something and it wasn’t in the kitchen after all.

“Okay, here’s my take,” she said. “Just ride it out. A lot of women destroy their lives in their forties and then one day they wake up with no periods and no partner and only themselves to blame.”

That had the ring of truth to it.

“So, you think I should just smooth things over?”

“I know that’s not the hip thing to say, but yes.”

“I don’t know if I”—I gasped—“can physically do that. Swallow my desires like that.”

Cassie sighed.

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’ ”

While I squeezed our child and brushed hidden clusters out of their hair, Harris informed me (my forehead) that he would be throwing a brunch next Sunday.

“To celebrate Caro’s new single ahead of the release.”

“Of course.”

I couldn’t believe it. This was where his focus was?

“Do you want me here for it?” I asked, trying to imagine Caro and me in the same room. This brunch didn’t really fit into the theory of their secret affair, unless it was a “hidden in plain sight” kind of thing. Still, wouldn’t he have a better time without me there? “I could help set up and then leave for a few hours. What kind of food were you thinking?”

Harris looked up at the kitchen ceiling and shut his eyes as if I’d just said something beyond the pale.

“I’d like to be with a person who actually wants to be here,” he whispered. Not to me but to himself or the gods.

“Have you been anywhere fun lately?” a long-haired man asked me after describing Cancún.

“No,” I said, “but I’m just realizing this dynamic I have with my husband where I express my problem so dramatically that I become the problem, which makes me desperate to win back his favor. It’s a cycle that keeps us from ever moving forward with our issues. I think my mom did this, too.”

“Sounds like you could use a vacation!” said the long-haired man, smiling and moving away from me.

“This all started with a vacation!” I called out, but he was already in the garden.

CHAPTER 22
He said it didn’t usually take so long, but his daughter had just gotten married.

“It was a big to-do. Destination wedding. Anyway, you had some plates you wanted to run?”

“No, not anymore. I figured it out.” I told him about the telephotographer and the real estate card.

“Why the telephoto lens, though? Is it a close-up photo?”

“No. Brian just thought that.”

“Who?”

“Your friend Brian who used to be my neighbor. He gave me your number. He works for the FBI?”

“Oh. You know he died.”

I gasped. “I didn’t know that. Oh my god. Was it . . . in the line of duty?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did he get shot?”

“No, no, he had something wrong with his kidneys. I think he was only in the FBI for about a month before he got his diagnosis and had to quit.”

That’s why he was selling his truck. He wasn’t moving; he was dying.

Tim Yoon asked if there was anything else I needed.

“People finding? Anyone you’re having trouble tracking down?”

I said no.

“Yeah, there’s a lot less need for that service now, with Facebook and everything.”

That night I told Harris about the telephotographer, the real estate card, and the death of our neighbor. I was glad to have something major to report on; he had to say something—a man had died.

“That’s sad. He was a young guy.” Each word said like a dollar he wished he was spending elsewhere.

“So he wasn’t even in the FBI anymore,” I said.

“Right.”

“But he was still wearing his uniform.”

“Yep. Heartbreaking.”

It seemed like the conversation would end there, but then, incredibly, he asked what they’d priced our house at. I couldn’t remember. I ran out to the garage and came back with the card.

“One point eight,” he read. “Okay. Good to know.” Then he leaned in, squinting. “Is that you?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. Creepy. He probably shot it from his car.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said. This was almost an actual conversation. And there was a strange feeling in the air; I couldn’t put my finger on it. Now he was just sitting there, not speaking.

“Maybe go put that robe on,” he said finally, very tersely.

“My robe? Why?”

He glowered, said nothing.

“I gave it to Goodwill.”

He stood up. I guessed that was that. But before he left the room he said, “Just wear something else.”

The front door slammed shut as I stared at my dresser. Did he just leave? I put on a short, sheer nightie and stood half-naked in the living room for what felt like a year, but if this was a test then I would stand there for the rest of my life. After a while I peeked out the front windows. He was sitting in his car. Should I go out there? I went back to my spot. Eventually there was a quiet knock at the door.

He didn’t do a whole lot to get into character so it took me a moment. I invited him in, we sat on the bed. He took out his phone and showed me the pictures he’d just taken; our big curtainless windows glowed in the dark and my nightgown was completely translucent. This made me stupidly wet, but he seemed unmoved. I folded my hands in my lap.

“What else do you like to take pictures of?” I asked the telephotographer.

“Nature scenes mostly.”

“Have you ever been to Zion National Park?”

“Nope.”

“I’m gonna pass through there,” I said. “I’m about to drive across the country.” If I was playing myself in the real estate card then I hadn’t gone on my trip yet. Not that historical accuracy necessarily mattered here.

“I wouldn’t let you drive that far alone if you were my wife.”

“No? Well, I want a challenge, an adventure.”

“I can give you an adventure.”

Even still I wasn’t sure.

“He’ll never know the difference,” he added.

“Who?”

“Your husband.”

He unbuckled his pants and let his heavy dick fall out. Okay then. I went down to my knees, shut my eyes, and got started thinking about the telephotographer, who had ended up Asian in my mind, like Tim Yoon. He said something I didn’t catch.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re a real ‘good-time girl,’ huh?”

“A real—?”

He slapped my ass. Yow. He was really committed to his role. He even looked a little different, the way his mouth was hanging open and his eyes were kind of mean. He pulled me up and onto the bed. Oh: he was still furious at me. And with his eyes boring down I couldn’t shut mine, which was a problem—how could I think with him right there? A crisis actually, because suddenly it was clear that everything depended on this; I had to fuck the telephotographer without shutting my eyes. I tentatively ran my hands over the salt-and-pepper hairs on his barrel chest; he shifted and an acrid scent rose from the sheets, slapping me in the face. This man, this erect photographer, was really here, not a fantasy. I desperately tried to remember what I’d be doing if this were happening in my head. He jerks off in his car, shows you the pictures, takes out his dick—what do you do? You, the good-time girl. I could hear her pathetic begging and whining sounds, first in my head and then coming out of the depths of my throat like a soul channeled. These sounds triggered an arching and writhing and saying of the words Fuck me. Please, yes, yes, come on, fuck me. As with Audra there was a sort of salty-and-sweet combination of body and mind that made a brand-new thing, like alchemy. Or sex. The real estate card photographer was really responding to all this, he pounded me and the new deep ache that wasn’t a polyp or a cyst surged hopefully. Everything was building and getting more and more raunchy and unbridled and it was all possible with this guy, this Asian photographer who didn’t really know me. I couldn’t help thinking Harris would be so embarrassed after he came.

But he wasn’t—he wasn’t embarrassed and he wasn’t Harris. He wiped his cum off my chest with his boxers and lay back, reaching his arm around me. It had been ten hundred years since I’d lain in these arms. He told me about all the things he usually photographed besides houses and nature. He photographed cars for car ads. He did headshots for actors and models. He did still photography for porn movie shoots and sometimes he photographed pets.

“We got a dog recently,” I said.

“What kind?”

“Sort of a mix.”

“A mutt?”

“I guess so. It’s more the dog of my husband and child.” I hoped this wasn’t going too far. After a while he said he was a cat person and fell asleep. I went down the hall to my bed.

—
When I called Jordi to tell her about last night’s surprising turn of events she breathed a huge sigh of relief and said, Make-up sex is the best.

It is. It is, I agreed. I pressed my forehead against the garage wall. I had thought it was more than that, something that didn’t already have a name.

I walked in a circle; a bubble suspended in oil.

I re-pinned the real estate card above my desk, studying the woman in the robe who had started all this.

The Jungian “provisional self,” that’s who she was. Like a caterpillar or a tadpole she wasn’t meant to last forever, but maybe from her a new thing could be made.

I drove to the Goodwill where I had donated the eleven black garbage bags—the first ten were ancient history, but the eleventh had sat near the front door until just a couple weeks ago. What were the odds of the robe being in the eleventh bag? I searched Nightwear and Lingerie. I checked Children’s, because it was small, and Dresses, just to be safe.

“It might not be at this store,” a staff member said. “The donations get dispersed. It could be at any Goodwill in California. Or more likely someone bought it already.”

“So you think this is hopeless?” I said, eyeing a pair of ceramic lions.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Is this it?” said another staff member, holding up a plastic hanger with my robe on it.

—
“This is my robe,” I told the cashier.

“It’s cute,” she said.

“I mean it was my robe before and then I donated it to you guys and now I’m buying it back.”

“Okay,” she said, wrapping the lions in newspaper.

“It’s weird to have to buy it again, almost seems like I should be able to just take it, since it’s mine.”

She glanced at me but kept wrapping.

“It stopped being yours when you donated it. And it starts being yours again when you pay for it. No special deals.”

I hadn’t been angling for a special deal. My point was: what makes something yours? I guess paying for it was her answer.

While Harris tucked Sam in I cleaned the lions and put them in front of the fireplace. They looked nice there. Slowly turning, I scanned the rest of the living room, looking for something else I had contributed, anything. But there was nothing. In fifteen years I’d never changed a thing about the décor. Or I had tried, once or twice—a new dish-drying rack, a basket—but Harris had cringed at my choices and I hadn’t pushed back. (Why argue? Less fussing with baskets meant more energy for my work.) So these lions were only my eleventh and twelfth contributions to the home, the first ten being all the spoons.

I hung out in my room for a while, then took off my clothes and put the robe on. Its familiarity made me light-headed. Harris was flossing when I came in. He looked me up and down. Had I been too literal? The robe was nothing special unless you remembered the picture on the card.

He didn’t sit in his car this time; the photography part was implied. The sex was the same but more so—it was their second date and it was clear there was something between them, an intense chemistry that I hadn’t felt with anyone before. And it wasn’t just sex. Feelings were beginning to develop.

“I can really be myself with you,” I said afterward, in his arms again.

“That’s nice,” he said lazily. “You’re a great girl. A catch.”

“I’m really not, not in my regular life.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

I stroked his chest, thinking.

“Do you think we could ever . . . make a go of it?” I said finally, caution to wind thrown. The telephotographer seemed taken aback but not shocked.

“Would you really want to leave your husband and this nice house?”

“I mean, it would be hard. But I’d like to feel this way all the time.”

“And you have a child, right? A son?”

“They’re nonbinary. They/them pronouns.”

“Okay. That’s new,” he said.

I almost laughed, but his total commitment made that impossible.

“You’re right, I couldn’t do that to my child. They have enough on their plate without divorce.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t want to mess up a kid’s life like that.”

“But in theory, would you want me if I was available?” I couldn’t let it go.

“I would. But it wouldn’t be like this if we were together all the time.”

“Right. Eventually I’d probably have an affair.”

We were quiet, looking down this never-ending hall of mirrors.

“And knowing me, that affair would probably be with my ex-husband, Harris. I always want what I can’t have.”

“I mean, I would be okay with that,” said the telephotographer.

It seemed in this moment that we had cracked the code. Marriage would always be chasing us, but with this trick we could outrun it forever. I couldn’t think of any reason why this wouldn’t work.

“Let’s give it a go,” I said. I was worried he’d be insulted, that Harris would be, but the telephotographer just tightened his arm around me and kissed the top of my head.

“I’m game, but are you sure you don’t want to just keep meeting like this?”

“I want more.”

—
The next morning, Saturday, was a little awkward. We obviously weren’t in our roles because that would be confusing for Sam. But there was a politeness, a little extra energy. A small altercation about rotting lettuce was quickly abandoned. We were waiting for nightfall. The sun toyed with us, setting and then rising back up a little, sinking then lifting until finally it fell once and for all.

I almost thought we might skip the sex and just jump right into conversation, but of course there was only one way through the looking glass. And there was a new thing tonight: me pressuring him. He wanted to keep his pants on and I shoved his hands away and yanked them down. He suddenly “wasn’t sure he was comfortable with this” and I didn’t care, just wanted what I wanted. How this fit into the telephotographer’s psychological narrative was anyone’s guess; it just felt really good to run roughshod over his feelings and boundaries, and of course ultimately his own body betrayed him and he came around.

“I told my husband,” I said, recovering in his arms. I had been planning to say this all day; if I didn’t push the story forward then it really was just make-up sex.

“Really?” said the telephotographer. I could feel Harris become very still.

“Yeah.”

“How did it go?”

“He was furious.”

“Understandable.”

“I know. I’m having second thoughts.”

“Because he’s so mad?”

“And hurt. I don’t want to hurt him.”

The telephotographer was silent for a long time. I wondered if he could feel my heart pounding.

“Well, in the long run it hurts him more to stay with someone who doesn’t want to be with him.”

This was almost exactly what he had said right before our big fight. Was this like dying in a dream and real life at the same time? Could our marriage dissolve in this fictional place?

“Hey,” he said, “don’t get too much in your head.”

I took a deep breath.

“That’s right. Let it all out.”

He asked about my youth, where I was from, and I ended up telling him about working in the peep shows. Squirming around in lingerie and less. Despite fifteen years of careful downplaying, I didn’t actually have any particular shame about this job; it felt like other things, a mixed bag. Unlike Harris, the telephotographer liked hearing my stripper stories; he said he’d dated a lot of women “dancers” and he actually preferred them because they were more free with their bodies. I was quietly stunned by Harris’s convincing portrayal of this kind of man.

“But you wouldn’t do that anymore, right?” he couldn’t help adding.

“To be honest”—and honesty was suddenly the whole point—“I still think of it as my fallback.”

Both men needed a second to process that. I didn’t mean stripping per se (I was probably too old), just that I was still the same person who might give a stranger a show. She couldn’t be tidily filed into the past.

“You know what?” he said finally, “I think that’s cool. It’s your body, you do what you want with it.”

“Thank you.” My eyes welled. What you wanted to do in your dream was not die but fly—levitate—and hope that the ability carried through to the next day. The next day worried me. Harris and I were falling behind these two; the gap was getting too big.

—
We avoided each other for the whole morning, which was easy to do—first one of us was with Sam and then the other, like shared custody within the same house. There wasn’t a sexy tension, it was just strangely dead. I didn’t see how we could come together for a fourth night—this couldn’t go on forever. I wondered if I should let Sam be on a screen so I could go to Harris and say Let’s talk. I was considering this, very grimly, when he came into the room carrying the dog in his arms and looking shook.

“I think we need to take Smokey to the vet.”

We’d cuddled with him and sang to him but hadn’t brushed him every day. Or at all really. So he had developed clumps of matted hair, hidden ones that couldn’t be seen but which felt disturbing when you petted him, like cysts. I knew this—dog groomer was on the to-do list—but Harris showed me how a clump had formed over his anus, effectively basketing it shut. There was shit trapped between the clump and the anus; mixed with the frizzy hair it formed a very solid material, like adobe or sod.

I’d never heard of such a thing, but I could really imagine how terrible it would feel. Each time he opened his anus to shit, the previous shit was pushed back up inside him. Sam looked at our alarmed faces and called out, JESS! A family joke, the wonder-nanny, but neither of us laughed.

“We can do this,” I said, running for my round-nosed scissors. “It’s gonna be fine.” My emergency voice was always low and sturdy like this.

Harris held Smokey on the kitchen floor and we began talking to him tenderly, the way we used to talk to baby Sam. My poor sweetie, we said through our plugged noses, you’re gonna be okay. With my bare fingers I gently pulled apart the dog-shit hair. Harris pointed out where to cut. I carefully trimmed clumps and masses, always testing first to see if the dense mound had any living flesh in it. After most of the hair was removed there was still a surprising amount of impacted shit. I pinched it away, adding glob after glob to the monstrous mound on the floor, but each layer removed seemed to only give room for the whole territory to expand. I sat back on my heels, reconsidering. It seemed like there would be no end to this. Harris, still holding the dog’s legs, looked up at me. Keep on going, hon, he whispered.

I refocused and leaned in, digging through the shit with new commitment, pinching and trimming, and constantly murmuring, I’ve got you, baby, it’s gonna be okay. Smokey looked up at me, wide-eyed, and I wondered how a dog like this ever survived in the wild.

“They don’t exist in the wild,” Harris said.

We kept at it, together, on the kitchen floor. And lo. Suddenly a pink anus appeared, pulsing and oddly clean like the sucking lips of a tiny baby. What a dear sight. I gently wiped the area with a wet rag then Harris took the dog to the bathroom and gave him a bath. I threw the obscene pile of shit-hair into the outdoor trash can, washed my hands, disinfected the floor, washed my hands again, and then stood beside Harris and watched our very clean dog bound around the living room in weightless confusion. We would take him to the groomer tomorrow, but it went without saying that this terrible event was one of the most important things that had ever happened between us. Second only to that time we put on our shoes at dawn and rushed to meet Dr. Mendoza at the hospital.

Who the fuck had we been? Starving hunters? Had we crested Donner Pass together? Or had we tried to and died trying. And now in this lifetime we only felt right when we were saving a life together, fixing a flat tire by the side of the highway; we only became us against insurmountable odds. The rest of the time we respectfully forgave each other for utterly failing to be what we felt we deserved and then some of the time we were fucking furious about this and it seemed impossible to continue, but this itself was a sort of emergency and thus brought out our lifesaving skills, our diligence and seriousness. And so we were condemned to a very rigorous, if joyless, life that was profoundly meaningful until suddenly one day it wasn’t. Because I had felt joy. Stupid, pointless joy. Sam was wrestling with Smokey now. We watched the two of them moving like a little tornado from room to room.

“I didn’t like that dance,” Harris said quietly, looking straight ahead, out the window.

I couldn’t believe it.

He was picking up the conversation exactly where we’d left off before it had blown up, and his position hadn’t changed. All the telephotographer’s sexy understanding had been an act.

Bleakness rose up around me.

What could I say? It would be silly to ruin a whole marriage over a single, booty-shaking Instagram post. Sam and Smokey ran past, screaming and barking. I shut my eyes and saw myself in the Excelsior parking lot, lit by headlights: raw and extravagant, erotic and wholly consumed by a ceremony of my own invention. For months I had trained for it as if I were preparing for Mount Everest or some other death-defying challenge. I had believed my life depended on this silly, slutty dance and I still did; everything had changed that night.

The barking and screaming stopped.

Suddenly the truth was simple and clear.

I had been honest in the video—I’d been myself—and Harris honestly didn’t like it. And this was his right; a lot of people, maybe even most people, wouldn’t like it.

“It’s just not your scene,” I said quietly.

“Right,” he said, kind of gasping. “It’s not my scene.”

We kept standing there, side by side, though Sam and Smokey were in the backyard now. After a while Harris cleared his throat.

“It seemed like that dance was probably . . . for someone.”

My stomach dropped and I made the mistake of glancing up. Our eyes met in the reflection of the giant window, a cold, desolate world.

“Did you see someone that night?” he asked, and in the blurry glass his whole body seemed to be streaming, spilling, though in fact his eyes were dry.

Given everything at stake the obvious answer was no.

Yes, I said. I had seen someone that night.

“A woman or . . .”

I tried to remember what an old therapist had once said about honesty versus kindness. He just needed to get the general idea, not every detail.

“Yeah. A woman.”

The relief on his face was plain. It was as if I’d worked out the whole chess game in advance and now all I had to do was move the pieces, answer the questions. Or else this was what it felt like to tell the truth. It had all been worked out in advance; in reality.

“Is it going to happen again?”

No, no, it won’t happen again; I’m so sorry, can you ever forgive me.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s probably going to happen again.”

I had thought my time with Davey was the halfway point of my life—the apex of my ascent into the unknown—but actually, this was. This yes, said on a Sunday afternoon.

He asked me if I could keep it in Monrovia and I said I could, on my Wednesdays.

“I figured.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that you were doing more than working in that motel.”

I didn’t protest; true enough.

“And . . . favored nations, right?” he said, looking down at his shoes.

“Favored nations?”

“The same rules apply to me.”

Oh. The foldout couch in his office; he probably hadn’t done anything on it but he wanted permission to now. I waited to feel a rush of overwhelming jealousy and rage. Indeed, I was shaking. But—and it took me a moment to realize this—only with surprise. One could even call it hope. He, Harris, the telephotographer, had seen me, or more of me anyway, enough, and I wasn’t being cast out. I could remain with him and our child in this house, as I really was.

“Of course,” I said, the same way I said I do at our wedding—no way of knowing for sure, but here’s hoping.