“Dick. Let’s make love.” And when thought re-entered her head, she added, “Please.”
Her leg had moved up, her knees had fallen open, into that exact position as the words escaped her mouth.
Dick sighed. “I can’t.” He shook his head and looked at the floor. “I just can’t.”
“Twenty-one years, Dick. Twenty. One. Years. I have no idea, no memory, of the last time we made love. It seems like this is something I should have. We should have.”
He sighed again, shook his head again, looked suddenly much smaller, much older.
“You mean because of her.”
Dick said nothing.
“That’s what you mean, isn’t it. You mean because of her you will not make love with me. With your wife.”
“I don’t want you to think for a second that our marriage unraveled because of her. I can’t have you think that.”
“That’s an interesting choice of words. You can’t have me think that.”
“Madeline, for god’s sake.”
“It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable thing to ask. To know it will be the last time. To have a memory of it.” She added, “We are still married, you know. Meaning that you’re already a cheater. Meaning that if you’re trying to avoid thinking of yourself as a cheater, well, too late.”
Dick walked out of the room and left the house.
Madeline remained on the bed, in the position with her legs open, for a long time.
No.
That’s not what happened.
That was what a large part of Madeline had wanted to happen. Part of her still wanted to believe that the man she had spent the past twenty-some years with was somehow an honorable man, a man who had strayed into a new love, and who had declared his undying loyalty to it, in the same way that he once had to her.
The truth was this. The minute her knee dropped, her legs parted, she called out her still-husband’s name, “Dick,” — who had come in to ask one question or another — he took one step closer to the bed. And then he took another.
paintings by Joaquin Sorolla and Diego Rivera