The Watcher

11

I’ve never been good at being alone, have always been too fond of having someone by my side. The single life never appealed to me. I’ve been in one relationship or another, with very few breaks in between, ever since I lost my virginity at the age of seventeen. Different women, but only one at a time—until now, that is. There are two women in my life now: my wife and Anna.

We’ve started meeting more frequently, less and less often at a hotel and more often at her place. We still fall into bed as soon as we close the door behind us. But afterward, we talk more, and for longer. We often laugh, and she cried once. Each time it feels a little weirder to get dressed and return to reality, where we mean nothing at all to each other. It’s like living in parallel universes.

Today, as I was heading to our date, my wife called. She asked where I was and when I would be home. I hate lying, hate going behind people’s backs. I feel an urgent need to tell her what’s going on. But what actually is going on between Anna and me? My head is throbbing. All I know is that it can’t continue like this.

I think back to a TV series we used to watch when we were still happy newlyweds. It feels like ages ago, but there’s still one line that is indelibly etched in my memory… “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Apparently it’s a literary quote, but I’d never heard it, and I remember that I laughed, and thought it was quite ingenious. But no matter how I try, I can’t remember my wife’s reaction. It was before she told me the terrible news. Otherwise I’d remember, I’m sure of it.

In hindsight, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that she didn’t tell me until after we were already married. I can’t help but wonder why, can’t help but wonder whether she consciously wanted to wait until we were legally bound together before she released her secret from the darkness. For all the days and nights before then, she’d been keeping something like that inside herself, concealed from me, the person she said she loved most. I still have a hard time fathoming it, making it fit with the image I have, or had, of our relationship. I thought we could talk about everything.

Sometimes, especially in the beginning, we would end up discussing our previous relationships and what had gone wrong in them. She mentioned her first love—of course she did, said that she was both disappointed and heartbroken. I remember interpreting it as a touching, although very classic, story of young heartache. There was no innuendo of anything else, not then. As I said, she waited until later to reveal the rest.

I pull my hands though Anna’s hair, press her naked body tightly to my own… but something has happened. The protective filter between us and everything else is being chipped away. It’s no longer so easy to forget the outside world. I am having more and more trouble not thinking about my wife when I’m with Anna. I’m haunted by my guilty conscience. Of course I feel guilty, but there’s something else, too. It’s related to the story my wife finally revealed—the story of what happened when she was younger, how she drove herself beyond all limits, went beyond everything that common sense dictates and everything that physical pain entails in order to seek revenge.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

I close my eyes and hold the woman in my arms even closer.

How will this turn out? How will this turn out for all of us?