I’ve completed my househusband tasks while the kids are off at school and Sadee left early this morning for what she said is an urgent meeting of senior administrators at the university. I sit at the table as if I am studying for an exam and I have two meticulously arranged windows open on my laptop. One is a dreary and sometimes angering chronological file of jobs I have applied for and the miscellaneous emails and documents affiliated with each application. I’ve maintained this file only for the reason that I once thought hopelessly that things might come to this. I would have applied to dozens of jobs (actually, it’s fifty-four), and having a poor memory for the feel of any interviews I actually got, I would at least have this textual material to go through to find a pattern of some kind.

It’s like a postmodern novel I can’t understand though, can’t determine why this sentence follows that one, and why am I reading about a forest now when the main character was in Paris seven pages ago? Or a textbook on something I know almost literally nothing about. I don’t know, Mesopotamian coins or spacecraft propulsion or a host of other subjects I could not even fake at a dinner party. When was Mesopotamia anyway? Does it still exist as a place or is it now a modern country with another name? Is it, was it, a place, or is it the name of an era? I am ignorant. And propulsion. Why don’t the rockets just explode or at best fall over and keep twirling like a balloon that someone has let the air out of?

My meta-analysis doesn’t come to much in the way of a useful conclusion. At about interview number ten I know I exhibited no nervousness, my résumé was error-free and with a well-considered balance of neither too little nor too much detail, and the cover letters were exquisite. I prepared. I dressed right. I never sucked up or bragged or certainly didn’t exaggerate, but (with a few exceptions) I got the content and the tone right.

I close the window and move to the other one, which in a sense I do understand a little. If Mesopotamia is in fact a former land and civilization, I am sure that some of its inhabitants were having sexual relations with someone other than what we now call their domestic partner, spouse, wife, husband. They may have been fucking godlessly like hedonists freed of the strictures of civilized behaviour. I’ve looked at the photos over and over in detail, and done similarly with the recordings, so I don’t need to torture myself with review again of Sadee and the student. This is an easy subject, like introductory psychology was, and I just need to think about how I am going to let her know that I know, and then what I am willing to suggest or to accept as the result of it. Something hard and dense in my gut, like a stone, tells me that there is no stopping this. She’s either in love with another woman, or she has written off our lifeless marriage and is having some fun wherever she can get it. Or both.

It’s a Saturday just before eleven in the morning and Sadee is putting on her coat for the date I’ve suggested for us as Postmistress’s Scones but I pad down to the foyer and ask her if she wouldn’t just mind having a chat in the bedroom.

“But you said you wanted to go out. Best scones in the city. All that.”

“I know,” I say, “but I’d feel, I don’t know, safer or something in the bedroom.”

“Safer? It’s right downtown and crawling with people too sick of making their own coffee. I’m not sure what you mean by saf—”

“Can you just indulge me, Sadee? Can we stop talking here and just go to our room?”

Her thumb and forefinger have been on the zipper of her coat this whole time, and now she looks down at them as if pondering some bad news for them. You won’t get the chance to wrap around me as you always do when it’s a bit chilly.

“Okay, sure. It’s no problem. Parking would probably be an ass pain anyway.”

I just turn around silently and walk back upstairs while she takes off her coat and ultimately ends up at the doorway while I am sitting on the edge of the bed. My side of it.

“Jesus, John, what’s going on with you.”

“I know about you and the girl, the grad student,” I say, not having the internal strength to a slow lead-up to this topic.

Sadee comes over to the bed and sits next to me. Close, but not touching. I am looking at the floor but I can feel her staring at the side of my head, but the choreography reverses when I look over towards her just as she starts looking down at her socks, those little ankle-high ones, and they’re both turned ninety degrees so that when I look down again I can see the heels of them ludicrously on the side.

I am grateful that she doesn’t deny it and we don’t have to dispute a fact. That would drain me right down onto the hardwood floor.

All she says is, “Yes.”

We’re in sync now and when I look her way she’s already looking at me.

She starts talking with a calmness and forthrightness, honesty, I guess, that is a bit eerie but much preferable to the alternative.

“John.” She pauses but can’t seem to find words, or where to start, and so she just relates a narrative. “She’s not my smartest student, not even in the top ten. She pays attention in class but I’m not sure she has the intellectual and imaginative skills to absorb some of the obtuse theory. She stayed after class once—remember that time I was delayed?—she stayed after class and we started talking about the topic but it got personal fast. There were times when she just looked at me and smiled gratefully, maybe because someone was giving her some attention for the first time in a long while.”