Stalking

Sadee arrives home a little late from what does seem to be shopping. The next morning, John has conflicting feelings.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Lies I Tell My Kids. This is episode 7, “Stalking.”

I watch carefully as she enters the house. The door swings wide and clunks against the little table where we keep keys. She lays what must be shopping bags on the floor beside her and then carefully closes the door. The silence is so pure that I can hear the latch bolt as it slides into its hole in the door frame, and then a kind of soft thud of the deadbolt after she turns that knob. I’m tempted to shout, “Hey!,” as loudly as I can, but even at this late and exhausted hour I’m at least not that bad a person.

She moves the bags to the foot of the stairs and goes into the kitchen. Light goes on, fridge door opens. I hear plastic being ruffled, glass hitting against metal, a lid being laid down on the kitchen island. I’m willing to bet it’s baloney and a leaf of romaine lettuce on multigrain bread with a bit of light mayo. Her favourite. I consider my options now that it’s apparent that, well, she has been shopping and she’s just a little late. The other demon on my shoulder wants me to press for an explanation of why she’s so late, press her on details and timeline, and there’s where I realize the quest is hopeless. Almost any scenario would be plausible. Went with the girls for a glass of red wine after a long day. Or, traffic was insane. Or, finished early, said goodbye to the girls, and cavorted with a handsome stranger in a hotel room all through the late afternoon.

There’s nothing in this for me. I don’t want to hear whatever the prosaic or passionate truth is, and I’m tired myself as well and don’t have the energy to evaluate potential lies. Taking advantage of not being seen, I get up from the chair and go upstairs. Hustle into bed. I lie on my side with my head buried in the corner of the pillow on the off chance that she comes to check on me. Not much time passes, enough perhaps to wolf down a sandwich, and I hear the shuffle of shopping bags enter the room. I keep my eyes closed and again from a position of a sort of invisibility I listen to the telltale sounds of her actions getting undressed and then in the bathroom. Ultimately she gets into her side of the bed and there’s some movement before she settles into a sleeping position. She touches me on the shoulder. I am enough of a successful spy not to flinch, and instead feign sleep. She kisses my shoulder then and twists the other way into her own cocoon.

I open my eyes and in a brief moment of lucidity feel ridiculous. There was a time, oh so very long ago, when I had an integrity of some sort and would have just talked to her about things. About anything. But now I’m skulking in armchairs and pretending to be asleep with a woman who still apparently has some degree of affection for me.

Alas, the next morning, when we both wake up almost simultaneously, my mind has clouded over again and I have devolved to my former non-lucid state.

“It’s Saturday, right?” she says.

“Yes. Remember, Friday-night shopping spree so that you could wear yourself out and be able to sleep in if you needed to.”

“Thank God.”

She turns from her side position facing me, and onto her back, and her right hand reaches for her cellphone without her even having to look. Muscle memory. Ritual. I turn my head slightly to be able to see the screen but it’s too small and her hand is in the way. She chuckles at something. Then laughs out loud at something else, and turns the phone toward me so that I can see what looks like the pope surfing.

“AI,” I say.

“No,” she says, straight-faced. “He’s like that one from a few decades ago, the Polish guy, you know, he used to ski.”

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

“Well, honey,” she says, “he’s wearing the full regalia including the tall hat and the cute little pope shoes, on a wave that looks about twenty feet high. So, yes, I’m probably kidding.”

I get up to go to the bathroom and on the way back I can see that she’s casually thrown off the covers and she’s on her other side now, looking intently at her phone. Her left thigh is exposed up to her hip and I have a wave of desire that I have difficulty suppressing. And I have a wave of sadness and shame that my effort is to suppress myself instead of distracting her with something better than texts and memes.

I lie down atop the double pile of bedspread on my side now and say to the ceiling: “You look great. You look sexy.”

I feel like a spy sleeping with the double agent, not knowing what I should reveal, not knowing if she believes me, not able to simplify things and move my eyes away from staring at the ceiling.

“You’re sweet,” she says, “but I know I look like shit. We walked the length of a goddamn marathon yesterday and even got caught in the rain once between stores.”

I let it go. I don’t have it in me to tell her how much I meant what I said.