“No.”
“Tell me how is it different than with your wife.”
“No.”
“Your wife is attractive, right?”
I grunted. “I bet you might know the answer.”
“I might.”
I rolled over so that I could look Caroline directly in the face. “Did you goâ”
“Yes.”
“âto her office?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I was curious.”
“She knew you were lying.”
“I guess, yes.”
“It was an extremely fucked-up thing to do.”
Caroline drew back. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that.”
“She's smart, Caroline. She's very, very smart.”
“Smarter than me?”
“Yes.”
She didn't like my answer. “How do you know?”
“Nobedy is smarter than my wife, believe me.”
“Smarter than you?”
“Double or triple.”
Caroline was quiet. I felt the difference in our ages.
“My wife is a good person, Caroline,” I said, “and I really don't want her to be hurt by this.”
“I shouldn't have done it.”
“No.”
“I'm sort of interested in her, though. I mean, I'm supposedly going to be a married woman sometime.”
“You
were
a married woman.”
“Not really. It didn't feel like that. It was always just a strange arrangement. Simon never knew me, I think.”
“He never knew you?”
“Well, he knew me really well in some ways, but in other ways he had no idea. He
wanted
to. He kept trying to turn me inside out.”
“It was never something where time just went by,” I interpreted.
“I wasn't really a wife to him.”
“What were you?”
“AâI wasâa
specimen.”
“A specimen of what?”
“That's a good question.”
“I think you're actually a fine specimen.”
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“Are you a specimen of something?”
“Maybeâprobably. But it was never of a married woman. That's why I'm asking questions about your wife.”
“I don't mind telling you things, but no more contact with her.”
“All right.”
I didn't reply.
“I said all right.”
“Okay.”
“I'll ask a question now.”
“Sure.”
“Is she good in bed?”
“Absolutely.”
“You love her and she loves you?”
“Very much, yes.”
“Then how is it different?”
“If you don't have children, it's hard to understand, I think.”
“Try me.”
Her question seemed naive, but I attempted an answer. “After you have kids, death gets into it. You understand, now, like you never did earlier, that you are going to die. I didn't get that before I had kids. Now I worry all the time about them getting sick or dying, and I know that my wife is worrying, too. I think, What happens if I die? What happens if she dies? And who will die first? Who will be left alone? What happens if one of the kids dies? All this sort of gets into the sex. I mean, I watched both kids be born.”
Caroline rolled back toward me. “What did it look like?”
“The head looks like a little wet tennis ball. With Sally, Lisa had back labor.”
“What's that?”
“The baby is pushing against the spine, hitting the spinal nerve. Lisa was delirious with pain. I told the doctor to give her an epidural.”
“That's a shot for pain?”
“They stick a long needle into the spinal cord. They have to time it between contractions.”
“Did you see the umbilical cord and everything?”
“I cut it.”
“What's
that
like?”
“It's sort of like a thick bluish rope.”
“Is the afterbirth disgusting?”
“None of it's disgusting.”
“They pull out the placenta?”
“They put it in a stainless steel tray and you can have a look at it. Looks like a piece of liver the size of a phone book.”
“Both kids were okay and everything?”
“Sally had jaundice, which is not so bad, though she had to go back into the hospital, but Tommy came out blue.”
“Why?”
“The cord was around his neck.” I took a breath, perhaps sympathetically. “We got through that and then he caught pneumonia nine days later. That wasn't fun. An oxygen tent and so on.”
“He's okay?”
“He's very okay.”
She was quiet a moment. “All this is in the sex with your wife?”
“Somewhere.”
“Do you think about other women with her?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Temptresses of my own devising.”
“Have you had sex with her since having it with me last time?”
“Yes.”
“Once?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“So maybe eighteen hours ago.”
“Yes.”
“Did you take a shower?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Did you think of me when you were with her?”
“Absolutely.”
“I mean thinking of me not just because you feel guilty about me.”
“Yes.”
“I mean you were fucking her but actually thinking about fucking me.”
“Yes.” I looked at her. “I can sort of switch back and forth with no interruption.”
“You're making fun of me.”
“No, actually I'm not.”
“Did you think of her just now when you were with me?”
“Yes.”
“And not just because you feel guilty?”
“Yes.”
Her voice rose. “You thought of her just a few minutes ago?”
“Yes.”
“How about the other temptresses of your own devising?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think of men?”
“Sometimes.”
She thought. “Are you having sex with them?”
“No.”
“Who are they?”
“They are men and they are not me exactly but I am them. I am watching them have sex with the temptresses of my own devising.”
Caroline seemed dissatisfied. “What are some of the
other
differences between us?”
“You don't want to get into that,” I said.
“No,
you
don't want to get into that.”
I shrugged.
“There's a physical difference?” she asked. “I mean does it feel different, inside?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“She's had two kids. You've had none, as far as I know.”
“It makes that much difference?”
The question hung in the dark room, the music rapid and faint above us somewhere. Outside it had started to snow.
“It makes a difference.”
“Do you look at your wife when you're having sex and think âI am going to be with her until we die'?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you think about that?”
“It's both a comfort and a horror.”
“Why?”
“Because it's comforting to think that we will be together, and also I am horrified to think what time will do to us, to all of us. I am terrified by that. So to answer your original question, the difference between you and my wife, aside from all the obvious differences, is that with you I am not responsible for our future. I am not beholden to you, or you to me. It's all here, now. It's new snow on the windowsill. Very lovely now, then gone. You'll go off and do God knows what, marry Charlie, and I'll go back to Lisa, and I think we both know this. You are
now.
You will not age before my eyes for the next forty years. You will be here and that will be it. I can be with you and also not care whether you love me.”
“
Do
you love me?”
“From the moment I saw you.”
She smiled, pleased. “Maybe it was just cheap lust.”
“I guess you're right.”
“Really?” She gave me a little punch. “Well, maybe I was just a temptress of
my
own devising, catching you in my little web.”
“I don't care.”
“It doesn't bother you?”
“No.”
“But I could have all kinds of schemesâ”
“I don't care.”
She retrieved a cigarette and match from the bedside table. “Why?”
“I'm smart enough to get out.”
The match flared. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I'm very, very smart and you won't get out of my web.”
“I'll get out.”
“Why are you sure?”
“I'm smart.”
“Smarter than me?”
I thought of various answers. “We don't know yet, do we?”
I turned over to see her reaction, but she had closed her eyes, the lashes so thick and long they seemed to rest upon her cheek. I cursed myself for being fascinated by her. What an asshole I was. There was Sally, perhaps that very minute, cutting a piece of red construction paper with a pair of rounded scissors, or there was Tommy dragging one of his soiled stuffed animals through the apple juice he had just spilled, and there was Lisa, running the warm bathwater; all this while I, father, husband, protector, lay on a king-size bed uptown, my dick wet and limp against my leg, with another woman. Yes, I cursed my fascination with Caroline, but so, too, did I feel uncommonly happy for it.
“Tell me something else, about the difference,” she said.
I thought. “Well, there's the
ugly
difference.”
“Oh?” she said with interest.
“When my wife and I have sex, it's at the end of the day. We're tired. She's tired. She's worked hard, the kids have worn us out with dinner and the bath and the pajamas and the stories and so on, and we're tired. Usually she reads a little whileâ”
“What does she read?”
“The most terrifying stuff she can find. Right now, something called
Poison.
Anyway, when we get into bed, we're
going to sleep the night through, we're finding something together and then that goes into sleep, into unconsciousness, into death in the future. With you, you're not tired, your life doesn't have much going on. Maybe you worked out. Maybe the mail arrived. A few bills, some catalogs. Maybe you dusted your coffee table or called Charlie or told the maid to clean the showerâ”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Let me finish. The point is that I'm a diversion, a game. A trifle. A bonbon in the afternoon. I know this. I'm not taking you anywhere you want to go. I'm taking you away from the place you don't want to be. I don't suspect that you think much of me when I'm not here. You go to the gym and talk to your friends and go to Bloomingdale's or the movies or whatever, but I'm not part of your life, not in any way that's important. We're screwing each other. That's what this is, Caroline. Nothing more, nothing less. You know this. It's at the surface, nothing deep. There are no stakes, no mortality to be found in the relationship.”
“That's pretty harsh.”
“I'm taking you to the next level.”
“Oh, of course.”
“It's the only advantage older guys have.”
She smiled and rolled over and kissed me. “So since you've got this death-is-life thing, tell me a story about death, sweetie.”