You Think It, I'll Say It(24)

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I hear Mark told you, her message reads. Or “told” you. Since I’ve made it through the first trimester, we need to stop. I know I don’t have a ton of credibility on this front, but I mean it this time. I’m tempted to say something like Take care of yourself, as if I’m writing in your high school yearbook, when obviously we’re not saying goodbye for real, just goodbye to this version of things.

It’s eleven A.M., but if the correspondence is ending anyway, I doubt that I need to wait until noon to reply. Of course I’ll respect your wishes, I write, but are you sure? At the risk of stating the obvious, we could tell Mark we enjoy emailing each other about classical music, and I think he’d be OK with it.

She writes back, Are you kidding? He’d be okay with it only insofar as he could mock us both.

And then: And it wouldn’t be fun if he knew about it. ESPECIALLY if he was okay with it.

And then: When I said last year it was fine for us to keep emailing, I didn’t mean it. To put it in legal terms for you, I was giving you the plausible deniability you seemed to need. Sure, marriages come in all shapes and sizes, but if one person is getting close to someone else, either both parts of the couple have to know and be on board or else it’s a betrayal. Or, to use another legal term, a lie of omission.

And finally: The reason I pretended to think it was kosher when I didn’t was that it had become too hard to get through the day without hearing from you. And the reason I restricted the times we emailed each other was that I was waiting all the time to hear back, which was unfair to my family and a fucked-up way to live. It’s not that I actually WANT to stop now, but there’s too much at stake with a new baby. Mark and I need to be on the same team.

It is physically difficult to read these sentences—not for their conclusion but for what comes before, their implicit rebuke, her distress. I have tried throughout my life to avoid upsetting women, yet I have done so repeatedly.

I consider being blunter than I ever have before, blunt in a way I’d convinced myself was unnecessary with the sister-in-law I’ve known for over twenty years. I could write, I’m wired differently from most people. Call it my neurochemistry or call it my heart, but it doesn’t work like yours. It doesn’t feel what yours feels. My life would have been vastly easier if it did.

If I express these sentiments, I know, because I’ve been through it before, that two outcomes are possible. The first is that she won’t believe me, will cling to the idea of our being in love, and will plan to be the woman who’s different from earlier women. She will think she can cure me.

The second outcome is that she will believe me. She might initially call me names—I’ve been accused of being a Tin Man, of possessing a Frankenheart, of having a condition found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—but in the end what she’ll feel is pity.

I do not want to be cured by her, and I do not want her pity.

I don’t know what to say, yet it seems cruel to keep her waiting when she has made herself vulnerable. Thus I type, Neither “plausible deniability” nor “lie of omission” is really a legal term. They’re more like movie or TV versions of the law.

Then I scroll through old messages, reread the one she wrote about Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major for Violin, Viola and Orchestra, and listen to the piece in its entirety, while working on a brief. No message from her has arrived by the time the music concludes, but one comes in a minute later: Take care of yourself, William.



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It’s early March now, meaning the sun is rising when I reach their house; the eastern sky is pale blue and tangerine. Mark is stretching in the driveway again, and when he catches sight of me, he says, “Guillermo, my man. Salutations.”

“You’re in a good mood.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” He lifts his chin and nods it once toward the master bathroom window, which is above the front door. “Look at that,” he says. “Queen of my heart, vessel of my progeny.”

Indeed, Libby is visible through the window; she’s standing with her back to us, wearing a pink T-shirt. Is she about to sit on the toilet or did she just finish? Oh, our private habits, our private selves—how strange we all are, how full of feelings and essentially alone.

Mark wolf-whistles. If it’s an inconsiderate thing to do to the neighbors at this hour of the morning, it works; Libby turns and looks out the window.

“Hey, sweetie,” Mark says. Though I doubt she can hear him—he’s speaking at a normal conversational volume—she waves. But she is too far away for me to discern the expression on her face.





A Regular Couple


After dinner, on the first night of our honeymoon, Jason and I were sitting in the hotel bar playing cribbage when, from thirty or forty feet away, I made eye contact with a woman who looked exactly like Ashley Frye. Jason was dealing the cards—our travel version of cribbage comes in a zippered case with a miniature plastic board that unfolds and tiny pegs, and although the dorkiness of it makes me slightly self-conscious, it doesn’t make me self-conscious enough not to break it out—and I said, “There’s someone over there who’s identical to a bitchy girl I went to high school with.”