“Smart thinking,” he said.
“Not my first time,” she said.
On their third date, both of them just barely out of college, Tom and Melissa had sat in the dark. Bare legged on an itchy blanket, they had watched a movie at the Hatch Shell. Notorious. Cary Grant punched Ingrid Bergman in the face in the first ten minutes of the movie; the audience roared at the inappropriateness, at the absurdity of a man seeming to take care of a woman too drunk to drive by knocking her out in one punch, KO.
“She’ll have to fall in love with him now,” Melissa had whispered.
“Once she punches him back we’ll know they’re soul mates,” said Tom.
“The worst thing I’ve ever done in a car is puke,” said Melissa. Someone a few blankets ahead shushed them.
Tom whispered, “I killed a cat with a car. Not on purpose.”
She wrapped both of her arms around one of his and put her chin on his shoulder.
“It was a driving lesson, and the neighbor’s cat was asleep under our car.” Tom had had to stop talking for a second. “It made a sound.” He had watched his father get out of the car and look underneath. His face pale, he opened Tom’s door. He had said, “Why don’t you head back to the house.” He hadn’t wanted Tom to see, to even know.
“My dad tried to hide it from me, but I wouldn’t leave. He said it was a cat. Was a cat. He didn’t say, it’s Pickles. The neighbor’s cat I fed sometimes. The cat who preferred to sleep on our front steps. I couldn’t bring myself to look under the car. I just started to cry. It was a few weeks before my seventeenth birthday. He told me, it’s not your fault. Then he got a towel and pulled out Pickles and wrapped her up.”
They were whispering so close it was as if they were alone in the dark. The screen was the moon rising. Melissa pushed a tear off his face with her thumb.
“I never wanted to drive again,” said Tom. “He had the bundle in his arms. I asked to hold it, and I unwrapped the towel by her head, kissed her. She was so soft. My father said he’d take the cat home to the neighbors. I said I wanted to. She was still warm. He walked beside me with his hand on my back. I couldn’t even talk when they opened the door. He told them he had been the one driving.” Sometimes Tom forgot that he had ever loved his father. Tom kissed Melissa’s forehead. “I’ve never told anyone that.”
“Once at a summer camp, when I was four, I killed all the class pets,” Melissa had said. “I thought I was helping them.”
Tom laughed and what had begun to fall apart in him came together again.
“I just thought the turtle should be free so I shoved it under a gate into a field.” Melissa pushed both hands forward close to their blanket.
“Where it probably died of thirst?” Tom patted her knee.
She grimaced and shrugged. “Then there was a hamster that seemed really hot, and the kiddy pool was right there. And then the goldfish was just gluttonous. That one was barely my fault.”
“Karmically speaking, we’re not in good shape.” Tom hugged her to him.
“We should get a cat, to redeem ourselves,” she had said. They’d adopted their dog two weeks later. Melissa had named her Mukti, meaning freedom from the cycle of birth and death.
Now, in the dark of the closet he reached for her, grasping gently up her arm to find her face. He let his hands frame her face, pulled gently at her earlobes, kissed her. She moved into his lap, kissed back, led his hand underneath her shirt. He wrapped his mouth around the tendon between her shoulder and neck, the soft slope that dipped into the hollow above her collarbone. He bit her slow and hard, and she sighed, pressed herself deeper into his lap. They kept kissing, moving, hands and arms, turning their heads, first this way, then that. She turned in his lap to face him, wrapping her legs around him. His hands went under her shirt up her back. Her skin like water. She leaned back and then forward, pressing her forehead to his, both of them breathing hard.
“Why can’t it be like this at home?” she whispered.
He exhaled sharply out of his nose. She’s so quick to kill the moment. Whatever had been building went flat, and they were just playing a stupid game.
“That’s why,” he said and slid her off his lap.
She always wanted to pull it all apart, dissect it, put pins in it, put it under glass. She wanted to bring someone else in, a team, even. She talked about therapists, doctors, even third-party participants, like some kind of porno. She said she’d try anything. He believed it, too, all those ex-boyfriends, the one girl at boarding school. She still talked to some of those people. There was the filmmaker with the huge cock, Gigantor; the white boy with dreadlocks, who discussed the motion of the ocean (the voiced cliché hurt him to think about); the heroin addict with the Rottweiler; the alcoholic bed wetter, known as the Elf (an admitted low point for her); the Irishman whose name was either Ronan or Roland, she could never quite tell; the tattoo artist (she still talked to him); and the writer (the occasional e-mail).
And then him. Him in a long line of strange, deranged freaks who’d defiled his pretty wife in ways that he wished he didn’t know. Christ, she’d tried things that he had never thought of. At first all her experience was thrilling. Dating a slut is great, he told himself: no inhibitions, no judgments, his mundane fantasies happily tried, refined, perfected, bolstered by her own ideas, her flair for the risqué. He wanted to believe that.
But after their children were born there was a lull in things. While she healed, while they adjusted to being parents, to no sleep and no energy for each other, something happened. It was so small. The turning of a page, the whisper of paper, the hush of a finger down a fresh sentence. It was imperceptible at first. And things seemed fine, fine for years. Until she started to complain. And then he saw that it was not fine. That she was changing, or his response to her, as she claimed, was changing.