Dept. Of Speculation

25

The wife thinks the old word is better. She says he is besotted. The shrink says he is infatuated. She doesn’t want to tell what the husband says.

Anyway, he takes it back a few days in.

I am not very observant, the wife thinks. Once her husband bought a dining room table and it wasn’t until dinnertime that she noticed it. By then he was angry.

These are the sorts of things they talk about in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings.

But she does get irritated when her college sends around the memo at the end of the semester about how to recognize a suicidal student. She wants to send it back marked up in black letters. How about you look in their eyes?

People say, You must have known. How could you not know? To which she says, Nothing has ever surprised me more in my life.

You must have known, people say.

The wife did have theories about why he was acting gloomy. He was drinking too much, for example. But no, that turned out to be completely backwards; all the whiskey drinking was the result, not the cause, of the problem. Correlation IS NOT causation. She remembered that the almost astronaut always got very agitated about this mistake that nonscientists made.

Other theories she’d had about the husband’s gloominess:

He no longer has a piano.

He no longer has a garden.

He no longer is young.

She found a community garden and a good therapist for him, then went back to talking about her own feelings and fears while he patiently listened.

Was she a good wife?

Well, no.

Evolution designed us to cry out if we are being abandoned. To make as much noise as possible so the tribe will come back for us.

The ex-boyfriend starts sending her music. Rare cuts, B-sides, little perfect things. He wants to make amends, she remembers.

She did speed with him once. But it is not the best drug for her. Her brain tends to speed along anyway, speed, swerve, crash, and so on and so on. That is the default state of things.

Some nights in bed the wife can feel herself floating up towards the ceiling. Help me, she thinks, help me, but he sleeps and sleeps.

“What is he acting like?” her best friend says. Like an Evil Love Zombie is the answer.

That first time they fucked after she found out. Jesus. Jesus. He looking down at her body which was not the girl’s body, she looking up at his face which was not his face. “I’m sorry I let you get so lonely,” she told him later. “Stop apologizing,” he said.

What John Berryman said: Let all flowers wither like a party.

The wife reads about something called “the wayward fog” on the Internet. The one who has the affair becomes enveloped in it. His old life and wife become unbearably irritating. His possible new life seems a shimmering dream. All of this has to do with chemicals in the brain, allegedly. An amphetamine-like mix, far more compelling than the soothing attachment one. Or so the evolutionary biologists say.

It is during this period that people burn their houses down. At first the flames are beautiful to see. But later when the fog wears off, they come back to find only ashes.

“What are you reading about?” the husband asks her from across the room. “Weather,” she tells him.